How to move your own applications into the cloud by exploiting interfaces automation and accessibility features

Abstract

Cloud computing is regarded to as an impressive technology, as software and hardware resources become invisible to the users (they “fade” in the cloud), and they replaced by services. In this sense, cloud computing can be considered as an evolution of former virtualization approaches, with service providers delivering on-demand access to various back-end frameworks and front-end applications. This approach requires to strongly trust these providers, as users are forced to give up control on programs and data that were previously hosted on their machines. A possible way to alleviate this drawback could be to enable users “participate” to the cloud with their own applications, thus creating “personal” clouds, which could be even shared with other users. In this paper, we present a prototype implementation of the above idea, which consists of a framework that allows today's applications to be put into the cloud by exploiting user interface automation and accessibility information embedded in modern window-based graphics toolkits.