Yitzhak Mandelbaum and I have been thinking about language support for program migration. We submitted a short paper, Towards a core calculus for implicitly migration-capable applications, to PEPM’12 summarizing what we’ve done so far and the direction we’re headed. Here’s the abstract:

Mobile computational devices, like smartphones, tablets and laptops, have become a standard part of the computing landscape. Moreover, many users regularly interact with an assortment of devices, including mobile ones. Therefore, the ability to migrate UI-enabled applications is becoming increasingly important. We describe a design-pattern for applications to simplify support for user-session migration and provide an overview of a lambda calculus for which significant elements of the design pattern can be implemented automatically.

We’d appreciate any ideas, comments, or questions.