Partial and On-Demand Incremental Deployment of Java Application Program over the Internet

Abstract

Java applications have been distributed more and more over the Internet. Deploying a Java application by retrieving the entire program often encounters extended delay due to network congestion or large program size. Many times system resources are also wasted because users do not utilize every component of the downloaded application. These problems can be addressed by decomposing a program into smaller pieces for individual downloading on demand. This paper proposes a middleware by which a Java application can be partially and on-demand incrementally deployed via HTTP. The middleware also supports application caching and automatically transparent updating. The launching delay for an application in an experiment was found to be reduced by 83% from that of traditional whole-at-once application deployment. Total program deployment and execution overhead was 22% less than that of Java Web Start. The middleware provides functional benefits over related technologies: these benefits include finer-grained program deployability, on-demand incremental updatability, and alternatively simple developing environment