Lift - A mechanism for composing virtual app-clusters from heterogeneous apps

Abstract

Most people own multiple computing devices such as laptops, desktops, tablets, servers etc. sometimes geographically dispersed. Each such computing device may have a different operating system (OS) with its own native apps and data. Often these applications can be used only by the local users that have physical access to such machines thus limiting the application's utilization. As of today there is no adequate solution which allows the users to have a unified view of all or a subset of apps and data from multiple machines, at one place. The remote graphical desktop sharing systems such as Virtual Network Computing (VNC) viewer etc. do not fully address the problem. We call this ability to operate a native application from a remote foreign platform as lifting the application into that foreign platform. We define the semantics for liftability from an application's perspective, and propose a framework that allows lifting native applications. Using this framework a set of native applications residing on disparate machines can be composed into a single app-cluster. Such a virtual desktop offers native experience of the lifted applications. This concept is demonstrated through a prototype implementation working on Ubuntu platforms.