This talk examines system support issues for wide-area applications given the opportunity posed by remotely programmable resources. The development of a number of compelling wide-area applications such as Internet commerce, remote agents, online gaming, and news transmission has helped us identify a common set of application requirements, including: (i) naming of remote, potentially migrating objects, (ii) coherent access to global data, (iii) safe execution of remote programs, and (iv) secure, authenticated access to global resources. Unfortunately, today such system support is implemented in an ad-hoc and application-specific manner.

This talk describes some of the difficulties of developing wide-area applications and describes the design and implementation of WebOS, a unified set of system services designed to simplify application development and to more efficiently utilize wide-area resources. One demonstration of WebOS functionality is Rent-A-Server, a system that allows any Web server to dynamically replicate itself across the wide area in response to client access patterns.