Leveraging Legacy Code to Deploy Desktop Applications on the Web
| Citations: | 29 - 4 self |
BibTeX
@MISC{Douceur_leveraginglegacy,
author = {John R. Douceur and Jeremy Elson and Jon Howell and Jacob R. Lorch},
title = {Leveraging Legacy Code to Deploy Desktop Applications on the Web},
year = {}
}
Bookmark
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
OpenURL
Abstract
Xax is a browser plugin model that enables developers to leverage existing tools, libraries, and entire programs to deliver feature-rich applications on the web. Xax employs a novel combination of mechanisms that collectively provide security, OS-independence, performance, and support for legacy code. These mechanisms include memory-isolated native code execution behind a narrow syscall interface, an abstraction layer that provides a consistent binary interface across operating systems, system services via hooks to existing browser mechanisms, and lightweight modifications to existing tool chains and code bases. We demonstrate a variety of applications and libraries from existing code bases, in several languages, produced with various tool chains, running in multiple browsers on multiple operating systems. With roughly two person-weeks of effort, we ported 3.3 million lines of code to Xax, including a PDF viewer, a Python interpreter, a speech synthesizer, and an OpenGL pipeline. 1
