Strategies for content migration on the World Wide Web

The World Wide Web has experienced explosive growth as a content delivery m echanism, delivering hypertext files and static media content in a standard ised way. However, this content has been unable to interact with other cont ent, making the Web a distribution system rather than a distributed system. This is changing, however, as distributed component architectures are bein g adapted to work with the Web's architecture. This paper tracks the develo pment of the Web as a distributed platform, and highlights the potential to employ an often neglected feature of distributed computing: migration. Arg ues that all content on the Web, be it static images or distributed compone nts, should be free to migrate according to either the policy of the server , or the content itself. The requirements of such a content migration mecha nism are described, and an overview of a new migration mechanism, currently being developed by the authors, is presented.