A partial replication approach for anywhere anytime mobile commenting

Abstract

Commenting systems play increasingly important roles in the interactive web applications. Meanwhile, more and more web applications are visited on mobile devices. However, the intermittent connection of mobile networks and resource limitation of mobile devices pose great challenges, mainly in terms of interactive responsiveness and data consistency. In this paper, we present the first work of partial replication solution based on collaborative editing techniques, which can address the issues of local responsiveness and resource limitation on mobile commenting systems. We report how we address the consistency maintenance challenges that come with the partial replication approach. With this approach, users are allowed to smoothly comment anywhere anytime. The comment thread can be incrementally updated and automatically synchronized with strong data consistency guarantees. We implemented a system prototype called Hydra and evaluated it on a real data set.