language: en

Sync: A System for Mobile Collaborative Applications

Jonathan P. Munson and Prasun Dewan
Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
March 14, 1997

ABSTRACT Sync is a new Java-based framework for developing collaborative applications for wireless mobile systems. Sync is based on objectoriented replication and offers high-level synchronization-aware classes based on existing Java classes. Programmers may also extend the Sync-provided classes to create new replicated classes, either to add functionality or to modify a classs merge policy. Sync supports fully disconnected operation and employs centralized, asynchronous synchronization. Application programmers use the Sync framework to define conflicts and specify conflict resolution on the basis of the applications structure and semantics. We discuss the general needs of wireless mobile applications, and present a high-function example application that would be useful to mobile users, to be used for illustration throughout the paper. Next we discuss related work, and evaluate each work relative to its ability to support the example application. We then present the Sync framework, motivating each feature with its use in the example application.

INTRODUCTION