Live migration of JavaScript web apps

James Teng Kin Lo, Eric Wohlstadter, Ali Mesbah

Abstract: Due to the increasing complexity of web applications and emerging HTML5 standards, a large amount of runtime state is created and managed in the user's browser. While such complexity is desirable for user experience, it makes it hard for developers to implement mechanisms that provide users ubiquitous access to the data they create during application use. This work showcases Imagen, our implemented platform for browser session migration of JavaScript-based web applications. Session migration is the act of transferring a session between browsers at runtime. Without burden to developers, Imagen allows users to create a snapshot image that captures the runtime state needed to resume the session elsewhere. Our approach works completely in the JavaScript layer and we demonstrate that snapshots can be transferred between different browser vendors and hardware devices. The demo will illustrate our system's performance and interoperability using two HTML5 apps, four different browsers and three different devices.