Making Computers Disappear Appliance Data Services.pdfVIP

Making Computers Disappear: Appliance Data Services Andrew C. Huang Stanford University 252 Gates Building, 2-A Stanford, CA 94305 ach@CS.Stanford.EDU Benjamin C. Ling Stanford University 252 Gates Building, 2-A Stanford, CA 94305 bling@CS.Stanford.EDU John Barton Hewlett Packard Laboratories 1501 Page Mill Road (1U-17) Palo Alto, CA 94304 John Barton@ Armando Fox Stanford University 452 Gates Building, 4-A Stanford, CA 94305 fox@CS.Stanford.EDU ABSTRACT Digital appliances designed to simplify everyday tasks are readily available to end consumers. For example, mobile users can retrieve Web content using handheld devices since content retrieval is well-supported by infrastructure services such as transformational proxies. However, the same type of support is lacking for input-centric devices, those that create content and allow users to share content. This lack of infrastructural support makes input-centric devices hard to use and less useful. The Appliance Data Services project seeks to explore a vision of an appliance computing world where users move data seamlessly among various devices. Based on this vi- sion, we formulate three principles that guide the design of an architecture that helps realize this vision: bring devices to the forefront, minimize the number of device features, and place functionality in the network infrastructure. We evaluate our implementation of the ADS architecture based on these principles, and build applications using the ADS framework to evaluate the ease with which appliance com- puting applications can be built using the framework. We find that it is relatively simple to build and extend applica- tions on ADS that make using digital devices easier, which results in the devices themselves becoming more useful. 1. INTRODUCTION Digital appliances, such as digital cameras and digital photo frames, are designed to be easier-to-use, more-powerful improvements of their non-digital counterparts. For exam- ple, digital camera users can save a