Events Calendar

CS Colloquium

Speaker: Prof. Eric Wohlstadter , University of British Columbia

Talk Title: Object-Oriented Middleware for Offline Web Applications

Abstract: Recent advances in Web browser technology have led to interest for development of offline Web applications. Offline Web applications make use of persistent data stored on a client¹s local machine to allow for disconnected operation. Disconnected operation has been studied previously in the context of network file systems, object-oriented databases, and distributed object systems. However, previous work does not always apply to the unique software architecture of the browser programming environment. For this reason we have investigated object persistence middleware which meets the design challenges of this environment. In this talk, two specific technical challenges will be described: first, the event-driven architecture of the browser runtime and second, handling the dynamic nature of the JavaScript programming language.

First, traditional systems for disconnected operation rely heavily on lazy object loading (similarly, page faulting). However, the synchronous RPC mechanisms required by lazy loading are well known to be impractical in a Web browser (giving rise to the well known Ajax model). In this talk, I will describe the design of a persistent object-oriented programming model suited for the asynchronous browser environment.

Second, dynamic languages such as JavaScript are schema-less which complicates the mapping of objects to physical storage. Furthermore, such languages allow the runtime binding of first-class function instances as object methods. This complicates object persistence since function instance closures become part of the state of an object. In this talk, I will describe a JavaScript program source transformation we have developed that enables full support for the semantics of the JavaScript data model in our middleware.


Biography: Eric Wohlstadter is an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia. He received a PhD from the University of California, Davis (2005). His research interests include middleware systems, software architecture, dynamic program analysis, and aspect-oriented programming.


Host: Prof. Nenad Medvidovic

Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Kanak Agrawal