Department of Computer Science & Engineering

We present a new Web middleware architecture that allows users to customize their view of the Web for optimal interaction and system operation when using non-traditional client machines such as wireless palmtops. Our Web Stream Customizers (WSC) are dynamically deployable and can be strategically located to achieve improvements in performance, reliability, or security. An important design feature is that Customizers provide two points of control in the communication path between client and server, supporting adaptive system-based and content-based customization. Our architecture exploits HTTP's proxy capabilities, allowing Customizers to be seamlessly integrated with the basic Web transaction model. We describe the WSC architecture and implementation, and illustrate its use with three non-trivial, adaptive Customizer applications that we have built. The overhead in our implementation which we present is small and tolerable, and we believe is outweighed by the benefits that Customizers provide.

Pre-2018 CSE ID: CS2001-0692