freedom . js : an Architecture for Serverless Web Applications

Delivering web software as a service has grown into a powerful paradigm for deploying a wide range of Internetscale applications. However for end-users, accessing software as a service is fundamentally at odds with free software, because of the associated cost of maintaining server infrastructure. Users end up paying for the service in one way or another, often indirectly through ads or the sale of their private data. In this paper, we aim to enable a new generation of portable and free web apps by proposing an alternative model to the existing client-server web architecture. freedom.js is a platform for developing and deploying rich multi-user web apps, where application logic is pushed out from the cloud and run entirely on client-side browsers. By shifting the responsibility of where code runs, we can explore a novel incentive structure where users power applications with their own resources, gain the ability to control application behavior and manage privacy of data. For developers, we lower the barrier of writing popular web apps by removing much of the deployment cost and making applications simpler to write. We provide a set of novel abstractions that allow developers to automatically scale their application with low complexity and overhead. freedom.js apps are inherently sandboxed, multi-threaded, and composed of reusable modules. We demonstrate the flexibility of freedom.js through a number of applications that we have built on top of the platform, including a messaging application, a social file synchronization tool, and a peer-to-peer (P2P) content delivery network (CDN). Our experience shows that we can implement a P2P-CDN with 50% fewer lines of application-specific code in the freedom.js framework when compared to a standalone version. In turn, we incur an additional startup latency of 50-60ms (about 6% of the page load time) with the freedom.js version, without any noticeable impact on system throughput.

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