HomeViews: Peer-to-Peer Middleware for Personal Data Sharing Applications

摘要

This paper presents HomeViews, a peer-to-peer middleware system for building personal data management applications. HomeViews provides abstractions and services for data organization and distributed data sharing. The key innovation in HomeViews is the integration of three concepts: views and queries from databases, a capability-based protection model from operating systems, and a peer-to-peer distributed architecture. Using HomeViews, applications can (1) create views to organize files into dynamic collections, (2) share these views in a protected way across the Internet through simple exchange of capabilities, and (3) transparently integrate remote views and data into a user's local organizational structures. HomeViews operates in a purely peer-topeer fashion, without the need for account administration or centralized data and protection management inherent in typical data-sharing systems. We have prototyped HomeViews, deployed it on a small network of Linux machines, and used it to develop two distributed data-sharing applications: a peer-to-peer version of the Gallery photo-sharing application and a simple readonly shared file system. Using measurements, we demonstrate the practicality and performance of our approach.