Flexible Data Management for Mobile Environments

In this technical report we describe a flexible storage system aimed at supporting collaborative applications in large-scale environments that include mobile computers. In such settings two major problems arise: data availability and concurrent updates merging. The first is tackled by the combination of weakly consistent server replication and client caching. The second, through an open object framework that enables easy object construction, using type specific conflict detection and resolution. Thus, our storage system serve as a supporting platform to produce new distributed collaborative applications. To face the mobile computing characteristics, flexibility is a major concern in our system.