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International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies

WEBIST 2019: Web Information Systems and Technologies pp 1–21Cite as

webAppOS: Creating the Illusion of a Single Computer for Web Application Developers

Part of the Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing book series (LNBIP,volume 399)

Abstract

Unlike traditional single-PC applications, which have access to directly attached computational resources (CPUs, memory, and I/O devices), web applications have to deal with the resources scattered across the network. Besides, web applications are intended to be accessed by multiple users simultaneously. That not only requires a more sophisticated infrastructure but also brings new challenges to web application developers.

The webAppOS platform is an operating system analog for web applications. It factors out the network and provides the illusion of a single computer, the “web computer”. That illusion allows web application developers to focus on business logic and create web applications faster. Besides, webAppOS standardizes many aspects of web applications and has the potential to become a universal environment for them.

Keywords

  • Web computer
  • Web applications
  • Web application operating system
  • webAppOS
  • Web application platform

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Fig. 1.
Fig. 2.

Notes

  1. 1.

    jsoncall calling convention is implied for such actions.

  2. 2.

    Since only authenticated users are allowed to access web memory, all non-static actions must also be non-public.

  3. 3.

    There is no one-to-one mapping with physical processors.

  4. 4.

    We use the word “standardized” from the webAppOS API perspective.

  5. 5.

    For non-Java code, a shared library for accessing web memory from Windows, Linux, and macOS native code is available.

  6. 6.

    It is bundled into the webAppOS distribution.

  7. 7.

    http://owlgred.lumii.lv/.

  8. 8.

    http://www.luaj.org/luaj.html.

  9. 9.

    https://dojotoolkit.org/.

  10. 10.

    http://www.gwtproject.org/.

  11. 11.

    http://directwebremoting.org/.

  12. 12.

    For instance, Java applets, VisualBasic, and ActiveX scripts can be launched by appending the appropriate tag (<script>,<object>, or<applet>) to the DOM; WebAssembly code can be launched by invoking WebAssembly.instantiate/instantiateStreaming, etc.

  13. 13.

    https://www.eclipse.org/jetty/.

  14. 14.

    Since currently there is only one client-side web processor, no manager is needed there.

  15. 15.

    Web-based Microsoft Office imposes the 5MiB restriction on files being edited online. Similarly, our web-based tools OWLGrEd/webAppOS and DataGalaxies normally require just a few megabytes of RAM per project.

  16. 16.

    https://www.os-js.org/.

  17. 17.

    http://webdesktop.biz/.

  18. 18.

    https://aaron-os-mineandcraft12.c9.io/aosBeta.php.

  19. 19.

    https://angularjs.org/, https://angular.io/.

  20. 20.

    https://dojotoolkit.org/, https://dojo.io/.

  21. 21.

    https://reactjs.org/.

  22. 22.

    https://aurelia.io/.

  23. 23.

    https://emberjs.com/.

  24. 24.

    https://vuejs.org/.

  25. 25.

    https://backbonejs.org/.

  26. 26.

    https://getbootstrap.com/.

  27. 27.

    https://d3js.org/.

  28. 28.

    https://jquery.com/.

  29. 29.

    https://jqueryui.com/.

  30. 30.

    http://www.gwtproject.org/.

  31. 31.

    https://blazor.net/.

  32. 32.

    https://nodejs.org/.

  33. 33.

    https://www.meteor.com/.

  34. 34.

    https://www.google.com/script/start/.

  35. 35.

    https://cloudrail.com/.

  36. 36.

    https://www.rollapp.com, http://www.alwaysonpc.com/.

  37. 37.

    https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/stable/gtk-broadway.html.

  38. 38.

    https://xpra.org.

  39. 39.

    https://www.citrix.com/products/citrix-virtual-apps-and-desktops/.

  40. 40.

    https://electronjs.org/.

  41. 41.

    http://webappos.org.

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Acknowledgments

The work has been supported by European Regional Development Fund within the project #1.1.1.2/16/I/001, application #1.1.1.2/VIAA/1/16/214 “Model-Based Web Application Infrastructure with Cloud Technology Support”.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Latvia, Raina blvd. 29, Riga, 1459, Latvia

    Sergejs Kozlovičs

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  1. Sergejs Kozlovičs
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Correspondence to Sergejs Kozlovičs .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands

    Alessandro Bozzon

  2. University of Seville, Sevilla, Sevilla, Spain

    Francisco José Domínguez Mayo

  3. Polytechnic Institute of Setúbal/INSTICC, Setúbal, Portugal

    Joaquim Filipe

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Kozlovičs, S. (2020). webAppOS: Creating the Illusion of a Single Computer for Web Application Developers. In: Bozzon, A., Domínguez Mayo, F.J., Filipe, J. (eds) Web Information Systems and Technologies. WEBIST 2019. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 399. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61750-9_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61750-9_1

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