Nowadays computing environments are made of heterogeneous networked resources, but unlike environments used a decade ago, the current environments are highly dynamic. During a computing session, new resources are likely to appear and some are likely to go offline or to move to some other place. The operating system is supposed to hide most of the complexity of such environments and make it easy to write applications using them. However, that is not the case with our current operating systems. Plan B is a new operating system that attempts to allow the applications and their programmers select and use whatever resources are available without forcing them to deal with the problems created by their dynamic distributed and heterogeneous environments. It does so by using constraints along with a new abstraction used to replace the traditional file abstraction.
Distributed systems; Operating Systems; Adaptability; Pervasive computing
