Strategies for content migration on the World Wide Web

The World Wide Web has experienced explosive growth as a content delivery mechanism, delivering hypertext files and static media content in a standardised way. However, this content has been unable to interact with other content, making the web a distribution system rather than a distributed system. This is changing, however, as distributed component architectures are being adapted to work with the web’s architecture. This paper tracks the development of the web as a distributed platform, and highlights the potential to employ an often neglected feature of distributed computing: migration. The paper argues that all content on the web, be it static images or distributed components, should be free to migrate according to either the policy of the server, or the content itself. The requirements of such a content migration mechanism are described, and an overview of a new migration mechanism, currently being developed by the authors, is presented.