Transparent Migration and Adaptation in a Graphical User Interface toolkit

We will defend the following thesis: The design and development of distributed user interfaces benefit from an approach that abstracts the migration and adaptation aspects away from the development of the UI (1). This approach is supported by a tool that executes the distributed UI orthogonally to the concurrent execution of the application. In particular the UI is migratable and adaptable while the application is executed concurrently uninterrupted (2). We call the conjunction of (1) and (2) transparent migration and adaptation. The application pilots the tool as needed for a migration or an adaptation, and receives the feedback in an event driven fashion.

The contributions of this work are:
-Introducing the migration and adaptation at the graphical toolkit level as a binding between a programming language and an existing graphical toolkit.
-Creation of a dedicated construct that reduces the development cost of this binding.
-Using a capability based approach for the migration.
-Allowing the dynamic migration of the UI transparently from the execution of the application.
-Using a configuration approach for the adaptation.
-As a side effect, this work also introduces some multi-user aspects.