Active Files: A Mechanism for Integrating Legacy Applications into Distributed Systems

Despite increasingly distributed internet information sources with diverse storage formats and access-control constraints, most of the end applications (e.g., filters and media players) that view and manipulate data from these sources operate against a traditional file-based interface. These legacy applications need to be rewritten to access remote sources, or need to rely upon ad hoc intermediary applications that aggregate the data into a passive file before executing the legacy application. This paper presents a simple, elegant, programmable method for allowing natural integration of legacy applications into distributed system infrastructures. The approach called active files, enables multiple information sources to be encapsulated as a local file that serves as their logical proxyw. This local file is accessed though a sentinel process, which automatically starts when the file is opened, aggregates data from multiple sources, and filters all access to and from the file. M...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: ICDCS
• Authors: Partha Dasgupta, Ayal Itzkovitz, Vijay Karamcheti
• Keywords: Active files, Distributed And Parallel Computing, ICDCS 2000, Information Sources, Legacy Applications