Yann Duponchel

The fluid computing middleware: bringing application fluidity to the mobile Internet

The fluid computing middleware allows application data to flow, as a liquid, between devices. The middleware, based on the model-view-controller design pattern, transforms a collection of devices into a cooperative platform and provides application programmers with appropriate abstractions to use generic data management services, such as data replication and synchronization of arbitrary data structures. Relieved from managing this underlying complexity, programmers can focus on developing new application functionality. In particular, they can program applications that seamlessly transition between devices and connectivity degrees, by relying on the fluid real-time optimistic replication mechanism. By shifting the focus from the network and devices to the data, fluid computing enables new interaction paradigms, where users can access and manipulate their data from any of their devices transparently. Applications, then, become multidevice - a characteristic that can be applied to both single-user and collaboration scenarios.

Managed portal appliance: an experiment in extending the reach of Web applications

In the typical Web application, a client renders markup and the application or service is implemented as a set of tiered functions in the network. However, clients can contain resources useful for an application and network connections cannot always be assumed. In this paper, we consider extending the reach of a Web application to include: 1) access to and use of local client resources, and 2) operation while disconnected from the network. We, however, try to preserve desirable programming model and management characteristics of Web applications. We propose a system architecture and discuss an initial implementation using a portal as an example Web application.

An Architecture for Providing Advanced Telecommunication Services

We describe a novel service architecture that allows service providers to deploy and provision telecommunications services in an easy and efficient way. In contrast to today’s Intelligent Network (IN) specification, the new architecture includes mechanisms for the automatic deployment, modification, and provisioning of services. It exploits the convergence towards IP as the universal network infrastructure to provide means for combining both Web and telephony services into more sophisticated and advanced ones.