Omero: ubiquitous user interfaces in the plan B operating system

It is difficult to build user interfaces that must be distributed over a set of dynamic and heterogeneous I/O devices. This difficulty increases when we want to split, merge, replicate, and relocate the UI across a set of heterogeneous devices, without the application intervention. Furthermore, using generic tools, e.g. to search for UI components or to save/restore them, is usually not feasible. We follow a novel approach for building UIs that overcomes these problems: using distributed file systems that export widgets to applications. In this paper we describe Omero, a UI server built along this line for the plan B operating system