Chapter 2State of the Art in MigrationFabio Patern, Carmen Santoro and Rasmus Olsen2.1Introduction to Migration FrameworksIn recent years, research on interactive migratory services has started by a number of R&T labs. For instance, one of the first works related to migration was the one of Bharat and Cardelli (1995), who put forward an initial solution for migrating entire applications (but without proving support for the user interface part), and which revealed to be problematic due to different execution environments and resources available in the involved devices. Among the earliest works we can also cite the one carried out by the HCI group at Stanford University, which aimed to generate interfaces for information appliances for extensible collections of services, namely ICrafter (Interface Crafter). ICrafter is a service framework for a class of ubiquitous computing environments known as interactive workspaces (Ponnekanti et al. 2001). The main objective of ICrafter was to allow users of interactive workspaces to flexibly interact with the services contained in the workspace. This project was nevertheless limited to create support for controlling interactive workspaces by generating user interfaces for applications obtained by dynamic composition of elementary services, and thus did not provide support for migration and consequently continuity of task performance across different devices. A number of previous European projects have considered some of the research issues addressed in this proposal, such as FP5 CAMELEON (Cameleon 2004) and CONSENSUS (Consensus 2004). In CAMELEON, issues related to the design of multi-device interfaces were considered. This project developed a good conceptual framework for addressing such issues, but it was only able to develop tools to provide support mainly at design time for multi-device, form-based user interfaces However, often there is a need for interfaces that are able to support multimodality and interactive graphics in such a way as to adapt at run-time. CONSENSUS ProjectF. Patern (飥� CNR-ISTI, HIIS Laboratory, Via G. Moruzzi 1, 56124 Pisa, Italy e-mail: fabio.paterno@isti.cnr.it F. Patern (ed.), Migratory Interactive Applications for Ubiquitous Environments, Human-Computer Interaction Series, DOI 10.1007/978-0-85729-250-6_2, Springer-Verlag London Limited 2011 9
