There is a sign up schedule for this talk: http://www.cs.ute

xas.edu/department/webevent/utcs/events/cgi/eidshow.cgi?person=JonHowell

Type of Talk:  UTCS Colloquium

Speaker/Affiliation: 

Jon Howell/Microsoft Research

Date/Time:  Monday, April 20, 2

009  3:30 p.m.

Location:  ACES 2.402

Host: Mike Wal

fish

Talk Title: "Leveraging Legacy Code to Deploy Desktop Appl

ications on the Web"

Talk Abstract:

Xax is a browser plug

in model that enables developers to leverage existing tools, libraries, a

nd entire programs to deliver feature-rich applications on the web. Xax emp

loys a novel combination of mechanisms that collectively provide security,
OS-independence, performance, and support for legacy code. These mechani

sms include memory-isolated native code execution behind a narrow syscall i

nterface, an abstraction layer that provides a consistent binary interface
across operating systems, system services via hooks to existing browser m

echanisms, and lightweight modifications to existing tool chains and code

bases. We demonstrate a variety of applications and libraries from existing
code bases, in several languages, produced with various tool chains, ru

nning in multiple browsers on multiple operating systems. With roughly two

person-weeks of effort, we ported 3.3 million lines of code to Xax, inclu

ding a PDF viewer, a Python interpreter, a speech synthesizer, and an Op