Separating Web Applications from User Data Storage with BSTORE

Abstract

This paper presents BSTORE, a framework that allows developers to separate their web application code from user data storage. With BSTORE, storage providers implement a standard file system API, and applications access user data through that same API without having to worry about where the data might be stored. A file system manager allows the user and applications to combine multiple file systems into a single namespace, and to control what data each application can access. One key idea in BSTORE’s design is the use of tags on files, which allows applications both to organize data in different ways, and to delegate fine-grained access to other applications. We have implemented a prototype of BSTORE in Javascript that runs in unmodified Firefox and Chrome browsers. We also implemented three file systems and ported three different applications to BSTORE. Our prototype incurs an acceptable performance overhead of less than 5% on a 10Mbps network connection, and porting existing clientside applications to BSTORE required small amounts of source code changes.