MIGRATING DESKTOP APPLICATIONS TO THE INTERNET: A NOVEL VIRTUALIZATION PARADIGM BASED ON WEB OPERATING SYSTEMS

In the past years, many solutions for virtualizing desktops and applications have been proposed. Unfortunately, given their significant resource requirements, their limited portability, and the achieved performances in terms of interactivity and usability, they did not prove to be capable of effectively replacing traditional local desktops. Recently, Web Operating Systems (Web OSs) started to be developed as an alternative approach for the creation of personal desktop environments, where newly designed applications created by leveraging on Web technologies can be accessed by end-users in a unified and seamless way. In this paper, a software architecture designed to further enhance the attractiveness of such environments by allowing existing desktop applications to be migrated into Web OS frameworks without any modification is presented. An automatic tool exploits image processing techniques to analyze the Graphics User Interface (GUI) of a remotely running application and to produce a detailed description for it, by recording its visual appearance and dynamic behavior. Then, this description is reloaded by a Web OS module that exploits remote computing techniques to provide the user with a local-like interaction with the virtualized application running on a remote machine. Thanks to the achieved separation between application logic and interface, the designed approach makes it possible to recreate virtual copies of original applications tailored to user device's characteristics, and it is additionally capable of providing significant improvements in terms of bandwidth usage and interactivity degree. Thus, without any re-coding, the original Web OS environment can be effectively enriched by letting the users run possibly customized copies of the same applications their are used to work with on a traditional desktop.