Paper Info
Title
Active Files: A Mechanism for Integrating Legacy Applications into Distributed Systems
Abstract
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 proxy. 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. More importantly, the integration of active files into client applications is transparent: an active file is virtually indistinguishable from a regular file. Active files find a variety of applications in both distributed and non-distributed systems. We discuss active files, their semantics, their usage and their implementations in Windows NT.
Year
DOI
Venue
2000
10.1109/ICDCS.2000.840985
ICDCS
Keywords
Field
DocType
active file,natural integration,legacy application,regular file,multiple information source,aggregates data,passive file,integrating legacy applications,active files,multiple source,local file,internet information source,legacy applications,data privacy,distributed databases,application software,access control,data manipulation,internet,software engineering,microsoft windows nt,data aggregation,computer science,authorisation,semantics,distributed system
SSH File Transfer Protocol,Virtual file system,Self-certifying File System,Computer science,Computer network,Fork (file system),Unix file types,Versioning file system,File system fragmentation,Operating system,Distributed computing,Computer file
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
0-7695-0601-1
2
0.38
References 
Authors
6
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Partha Dasgupta19025.64
Ayal Itzkovitz217213.22
Vijay Karamcheti364667.03