Portable Desktop Applications Based on P2P Transportation and Virtualization

Play-on-demand is usually regarded as a feasible access mode for web content (including streaming video, web pages and so on), web services and some Software-As-A-Service (SaaS) applications, but not for common desktop applications. This paper presents such a solution for Windows desktop-applications based on lightweight virtualization and network transportation technologies which allows a user to run her personalized software on any compatible computer across the Internet even though they do not exist on local disks of the host. In our approach, the user's data and their configurations are stored on a portable USB device. At run time, the desktop applications are downloaded from the Internet and run in a lightweight virtualization environment in which some resource-accessing APIs, such as registry, files/ directories, environment variables, and the like, are intercepted and redirected to the portable device or network as needed. Because applications are ``played'' with...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: LISA
• Authors: Youhui Zhang, Xiaoling Wang, Liang Hong
• Keywords: Desktop Applications, Feasible Access Mode, Lightweight Virtualization, LISA 2008, Operating System