Embedded system products nowadays are widespread
more than ever. In particular, smart phones, MP3 players,
netbook or tablet computers, and other mobile or handheld
personal devices with sophisticated functionalities including
Internet access capability have become indispensable in our
daily life. With the emerging technology of cloud computing,
the model of delivering services through Internet for
location-independent computing is becoming more and more
popular. It is obvious, although might be arguable, that
embedded system with the capability of Internet connectivity
would benefit relatively more compared to most desktop
systems in an environment of cloud computing. One of the
major keys, as can be observed, to this would be offloading
executing application software to one or more powerful
platforms in the “cloud” via providing web-based services.
As browser software becomes one must-have application
for accessing Internet, more and more web services as well
as applications are deployed to be operated through browser
software. However, quite many of those applications rely on
support from associated plug-in modules installed into the
browser software. Although installing plug-in modules is
common in ordinary computer systems such as desktop PC
or notebook computers, it becomes an issue in the arena of
mobile platforms due to various reasons such as platform
variety or system restrictions. This issue not only imposes
difficulty and results in incurring extra cost in developing
web-based services or applications, but also makes a hurdle
in taking advantages of cloud computing when the browser is
used as the main portal access to cloud computing.
In attempting to solve the issues mentioned above, an
approach, namely ACES which stands for Application Cloud
for Embedded Systems, has been proposed [11][12]. It
provides a mechanism to help set up a cloud computing
environment that supports offloading executing existing
applications over Internet. The main goal is to achieve an
execution platform based on Internet for embedded systems,
which can be either a stand-alone cloud computing
environment or part of another one, on which existing
applications can be deployed as well as executed, and which
is accessed using a browser with no plug-in installed. Most
notably, ACES allows applications which are not developed
for cloud computing to be deployed in the cloud without
incurring any effort in either modifying or porting the
applications. The development of ACES relies on a mechanism,
on the server side, to transform the original application
presentation into web presentation expressed by HTML and
JavaScript, which are common features of typical browser
software. Therefore, ACES requires, on the client side, only
a plug-in-free browser to accomplish the benefit of cloud
computing while allowing existing applications to be
reusable in the environment of cloud computing. In addition,
ACES can be applied to not only embedded systems but also
ordinary computer systems such as desktop computers.