METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR INCREMENTAL DOWNLOAD FROM SERVER TO CLIENT

摘要

A method and system for transferring objects between computers, especially a server and a device in a Java environment, is provided. A server connected to the device interrogates the device to determine whether the device has the available resources to accept a download, and to determine if any of objects included in the download are already resident on the device. Using a gateway object on the device, and a gateway managed-object on the server, the server passes an archive of the necessary objects, not presently available on the device, to the gateway via the gateway managed-object. The gateway then instructs a persistent storage repository on the device to commit the archive to persistent storage. A flag is set at the start of the archive-committing process, such that if the device loses power during the archive-committing process, upon re-initialization of the device, the device can determine that the archive-committing process failed and will instruct the persistent storage to free-up storage area used during the archive-committing process. The transferal of objects can then be recommenced once the server and device reestablish communication. The present invention can provide an effective means to ensure a stable recovery of the device upon re-initialization, should the file transfer and/or archive-commit process fail due to a power failure to the device. Further, the invention can increase efficient use of device resources by not loading redundant components on the device and can reduce bandwidth requirements and/or download times as redundant information is not transferred.