Global teleporting with Java: toward ubiquitous personalized computing

The essence of mobile computing is having your personal computing environment available wherever you happen to be. Traditionally, this is achieved by physically carrying a computing device (say, a laptop or PDA) which may have some form of intermittent network connectivity, either wireless or tethered. However, at the Olivetti and Oracle Research Laboratory, we have introduced another form of mobility in which it is the user's applications that are mobile. Users do not carry any computing platform but instead bring up their applications on any nearby machine exactly as they appeared when last invoked. We call this form of mobility teleporting, and it has been used continuously and fruitfully by many members of our laboratory. We are extending this idea from our LAN to the entire Internet using Java as the common interface. It is still our personal X sessions that are made mobile, but now they can appear anywhere on the Internet within any Java-enabled browser.