The Zipper System for Flexible, Replicated Application Sharing

Overview

For many years, people have wanted to share single-user applications. The vision has been to replicate instances of a single-user application across the network and transmit input events from one instance to the others. While there have been attempts to build such a system, they have had limited success due to an implicit assumption of application determinism. This assumption is untrue in the face of environmental differences among computers running the applications. After describing one approach to solving this problem, the paper discusses an alternate approach it is implementing in the Zipper system which addresses several shortcomings in the prior work.