Storing and Accessing Live Mashup Content in the Cloud

Today's Rich Internet Application (RIA) technologies such as Ajax, Flex, or Silverlight, are designed around the client-server paradigm and cannot easily take advantage of replication, publish-subscribe, or peer-to-peer mechanisms for better scalability or responsiveness. This is particularly true of storage: content is typically persisted in data centers and consumed via web services. We propose1 a checkpointed channel (CC) abstraction as an alternative model for storing and accessing content. CCs are architecture-agnostic: they could be implemented as web services, but also as replicated state machines running over peer-to-peer multicast protocols. They can seamlessly span across the data center boundaries, or live at the edge. They are a more natural way of consuming streaming content. CCs can store hierarchical documents with hyperlinks to other CCs, thus forming a web of interconnected CCs: a live scalable information space. We discuss the advantages of the new abstraction, challenges it poses, and the way it fits within the existing models for RIA development.