Towards a WebJDK: Extending openJDK 7 for client file system access over cloud

Deploying Java applications to the cloud with access rights to the local client´s file-system involves modification of the Java application code to use non-standard APIs for client´s filesystem access. With the steady migration of existing technologies towards a web-aware implementation, this paper presents the file access sub-system of a potential WebJDK. WebJDK is designed to provide an implementation of the OpenJDK that runs in the cloud and interacts directly with the client´s browser. The WebJDK implementation and its sub-systems are based on the Caciocavallo project by OpenJDK. The proposed file access subsystem implementation leverages the File-System API provided by HTML5. This allows the use of standard Java APIs for accessing files of clients with variety of underlying native file systems.