Framework separated migration for web applications

Abstract

Web applications (apps) are programs created by web technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Web apps can be executed on any platform that supports a web browser. Such portability allows an interesting user experience called app migration [2, 4, 5], which can save app's execution state information as a snapshot, transmit to another device, and continue its execution on the device. However, there is one feasibility issue in existing approaches because they save app's state without separating the JavaScript framework state, resulting in both time and size overhead. JavaScript framework such as jQuery is a library written in JavaScript to support web app development, popularly used in web apps. So an app's JavaScript heap is composed of app's objects and framework objects, possibly intermingled with their pointers, and the app code can modify framework objects. In this paper, we propose framework separated migration, which can separate the framework objects during snapshot creation so that snapshot does not contain framework objects, but does contain the changes made to them as well as the app objects. After transmission, the browser loads the JavaScript framework first, loads the snapshot, and restores the original state of framework and app objects to continue execution. With our approach, we could reduce 40% of total migration time, resulting increased feasibility in a real situation.