Towards a Web Operating System (WOS)

With the rapid development of new forms and concepts of networked and mobile computing, it is increasingly clear that operating systems must evolve so that all machines in a given network, even the Internet, can appear to be controlled by the same operating system. As a result, the world-wide interconnected networks, commonly called the Internet or the Web, could potentially be supported and managed by a giant virtual operating system [8]. For example, initially the World Wide Web was created to allow one to view remote hypertext pages on one's own machine, thereby facilitating collective work among geographically removed collaborators. Soon after, virtual pages, generated on the y using tools such as cgi-bin [2], allowed the widespread remote execution of programs. More recently, with languages such as Java [1], it has become possible to download fully executable programs to one's own machine, and then to make them run on that machine. However, there is no general means for taking an arbitrary program and having it run somewhere on the network. There are several reasons that this last possibility is actually essential. First, with the development of network-centric computing, there will be more and more limited-capacity machines (slower processors, limited memory or storage space, etc.), such as the NC computers [6], that will be forced to use more powerful computers on the network to e ect any non-trivial tasks. Second, an arbitrary program on the network might just be incapable of running on the local machine, simply because it is the wrong platform (hardware, local operating system, running applications, etc.) Implicit in the above discussion is the heterogeneous nature of most networks. The transparent use of such heterogeneous networks of computers has been partially addressed in work on metacomputing, whose objectives are to transform a network into one single computer system [3]. Recent developments in operating systems such as Inferno [9] or JavaOS [5] provide the user ubiquitous access to resources and information. However, the Web or the future global information infrastructure is more than just a metacomputer or a networked system of computers seen as a virtual machine run by a virtual (network) operating system, in that there is no complete catalog of all resources available. Moreover, such a catalog is infeasible, because of the highly dynamic and distributed nature of the Web or the Internet, continually integrating rapidly developing technologies. 2 WEB OPERATING SYSTEM: WOS