Fluid Computing
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News
- September 2005
- The Fluid Computing middleware has been included in IBM's
Emerging Technologies Toolkit and is available for download
from alphaWorks: Fluid
Sync.
- February 2005
- Article presented at the 2005 Symposium on Applications
and the Internet (SAINT'05): "The Fluid Computing Middleware:
Bringing Application Fluidity to the Mobile Internet,"
Daniela Bourges-Waldegg, Yann Duponchel, Marcel Graf, Michael
Moser.
- July 2003
- An article
on Fluid Computing appeared in the July issue of the ERCIM
News, a quarterly publication of the European Research Consortium
for Informatics and Mathematics.
- September 2002
- The article "Fluid
Computing - Replikation von Daten in Echtzeit"
appeared in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (24-09-2002).
- August 2002
- Fluid Computing was demonstrated at Pervasive
2002 in Zurich.
- May 2002
- Usability expert Jakob Nielsen says: "Multi-computer
user interfaces require seamless and invisible device coordination."
Read his column Supporting
Multiple-Location Users.
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Fluid Computing is a subarea of pervasive computing. It denotes
the real-time replication of application state on several devices.
Thus the application state flows like a fluid between devices. Here
are some usage possibilities:
Coupling of multiple devices for better usability: Mobile
devices have certain fundamental human/computer interaction problems.
Owing to the small size of mobile devices, information can be hard
to get in and hard to get out. With fluid computing, several
devices cooperate, for example small mobile and large stationary
devices, to mitigate these problems such that the user experiences
a single coordinated interaction.
Making best use of both full connectivity and intermittent connectivity:
The applications one can use with a wireless PDA today fall into
two classes: Server-based applications accessed through a Web browser
provide one with always up-to-date information, but they stop working
when connectivity is lost. Applications that reside on the PDA,
for example an address book, have a local copy of the data and work
in disconnected mode, but the information is only as current as
the latest synchronization. Fluid applications are a new kind of
application that combines the best of both approaches by adapting
flexibly to changing network connectivity.
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