Department of Computer Science & Engineering

We present an architecture for Web Stream Customization (WSC) which 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 are dynamically deployable and can be strategically located to achieve improvements in performance, reliability, or security. 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 its implementation, and illustrate its use with three non-trivial, adaptive Customizer applications that we have built. Our performance evaluation of the system shows that the overhead introduced is small and tolerable, and is outweighed by the benefits that Customizers provide.

Pre-2018 CSE ID: CS2001-0691