The Mobile Network Computing Reference Specification, or MNCRS, is a common Java-based platform for communicating mobile devices, developed by an industry consortium. The platform includes a framework for data synchronization, based on a persistent synchronizable store of Java objects. Two stores may be synchronized to bring them into identical states. There may be peer replicas of a store on several different primarily disconnected devices. Each object in a store belongs to an application-defined class. This class is required to implement an interface that includes several methods that the framework may invoke during synchronization, including class-specific methods for resolving conflicts between concurrent updates. This monograph describes the framework, discusses some of the issues and alternatives considered in specifying it, and explains one implementation of the framework, by a team at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. Proposals are presented for solving some of the data-synchronization problems that came to light during the specification and implementation.
By: Norman H. Cohen
Published in: RC21774 in 2000
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