{"id":153678,"date":"2008-12-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2008-12-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/msr-research-item\/leveraging-legacy-code-to-deploy-desktop-applications-on-the-web\/"},"modified":"2018-10-16T20:15:17","modified_gmt":"2018-10-17T03:15:17","slug":"leveraging-legacy-code-to-deploy-desktop-applications-on-the-web","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/publication\/leveraging-legacy-code-to-deploy-desktop-applications-on-the-web\/","title":{"rendered":"Leveraging legacy code to deploy desktop applications on the Web"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"asset-content\">\n<p>Xax is a browser plugin model that enables developers to leverage existing tools, libraries, and entire programs to deliver feature-rich applications on the web. Xax employs a novel combination of mechanisms that collectively provide security, OS-independence, performance, and support for legacy code. These mechanisms include memory-isolated native code execution behind a narrow syscall interface, an abstraction layer that provides a consistent binary interface across operating systems, system services via hooks to existing browser mechanisms, and lightweight modifications to existing tool chains and code bases. We demonstrate a variety of applications and libraries from existing code bases, in several languages, produced with various tool chains, running in multiple browsers on multiple operating systems. With roughly two person-weeks of effort, we ported 3.3 million lines of code to Xax, including a PDF viewer, a Python interpreter, a speech synthesizer, and an OpenGL pipeline.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><!-- .asset-content --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Xax is a browser plugin model that enables developers to leverage existing tools, libraries, and entire programs to deliver feature-rich applications on the web. Xax employs a novel combination of mechanisms that collectively provide security, OS-independence, performance, and support for legacy code. These mechanisms include memory-isolated native code execution behind a narrow syscall interface, an [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","msr-author-ordering":[{"type":"user_nicename","value":"johndo"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"jelson"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"howell"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"lorch"}],"msr_publishername":"USENIX","msr_publisher_other":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_edition":"Proceedings of the 8th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI)","msr_editors":"","msr_how_published":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_issue":"","msr_journal":"","msr_number":"","msr_organization":"","msr_pages_string":"339-354","msr_page_range_start":"339","msr_page_range_end":"354","msr_series":"","msr_volume":"","msr_copyright":"","msr_conference_name":"Proceedings of the 8th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI)","msr_doi":"","msr_arxiv_id":"","msr_s2_paper_id":"","msr_mag_id":"","msr_pubmed_id":"","msr_other_authors":"John R. 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