OWebSync: Seamless Synchronization of Distributed Web Clients

Abstract

Many enterprise software services are adopting a fully web-based architecture for both internal line-of-business applications and for online customer-facing applications. Although wireless connections are becoming more ubiquitous and faster, mobile employees and customers are often offline due to expected or unexpected network disruptions. Nevertheless, continuous operation of the software is expected. This article presents OWebSync: a web-based middleware for data synchronization in interactive groupware with fast resynchronization of offline clients and continuous, interactive synchronization of online clients. To automatically resolve conflicts, OWebSync implements a fine-grained data synchronization model and leverages state-based Conflict-free Replicated Data Types. This middleware uses Merkle-trees embedded in the tree-structured data and virtual Merkle-tree levels to achieve the required interactive performance. Our comparative evaluation with available operation-based and delta-state-based middleware solutions shows that OWebSync is especially better in operating in and recovering from offline settings and network disruptions. In addition, OWebSync scales more efficiently over time, as it does not store version vectors or other meta-data for all past clients.