Detail

Telex: A Platform for Decentralised Sharing

Developing write-sharing applications is challenging. Developers must deal with difficult problems such as managing distributed state, disconnection, and conflicts. Ad-hoc approaches allow for limited functionality and guarantees. We propose an application-independent platform called Telex to ease development and to provide guarantees.

Telex supports partial replication, i.e., sites only receive operations they are interested in. Telex is based on a principled approach, the Action-Constraint Graph.
Applications transmit to Telex actions (operations) and constraints (concurrency control statements) and apply execution schedules transmitted by Telex. In return, Telex takes care of replication and persistence, drives application progress, and ensures that replicas eventually agree on a correct, common state. Application developers can thus focus on the application logic, leaving to Telex the dif?cult distribution-related issues.

This talk reports on the design and implementation challenges of Telex, and on our experience with several applications.