In partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Master of Science
NILESH VAGHELA
will defend his thesis
Porting the Puppeteer System
Abstract
Office applications such as OpenOffice Presentation, OpenOffice Writer,
Microsoft PowerPoint, and Microsoft Word expose an API to enable external
applications to control their behavior.
When such applications are used in a mobile environment, the user
perceives long latency due to lower bandwidth when he or she deals with larger
documents. Systems such as Puppeteer have emerged with a novel idea to
interpose client and server proxies between the application and document
servers. The client proxy controls the behavior of application using its API
and the server proxy interprets the document format to help the client proxy
control the application.
In this thesis we discuss the experience of porting the Puppeteer System to a Linux Platform. We also present results obtained for the OpenOffice Presentation and Writer applications that we have adapted based on the principles of the Puppeteer system. Specifically, we have implemented various adaptation policies for these applications and for each policy measured the resultant reductions in user-perceived latency. We conclude that (1) The Puppeteer system is very easy to port across operating systems and adapting new applications or adding new adaptation policies to already adapted applications does not require modification of basic infrastructure. (2) Even simple policies can reduce user latencies by significant amounts.
Date: Thursday, April 11, 2002
Time: 5:30 PM
Place: 550-PGH
Faculty, students, and the general public are invited.
Thesis Advisor: Dr. Venkat Subramaniam