Managing mobile components

2003

YEAR BOOK

Home Page	Table of contents	Index by Author	Index by topics
	Search

Institute of Technology Tallaght

Niall Roche & Gary Clynch

Managing mobile components

Targeting multiple devices

Due to the rapid expansion in the use of mobile devices and the demands of users for increased functionality, a new method of managing mobile applications and processes is needed to meet these growing expectations. In addition, the large numbers of differing mobile platforms and operating systems require application developers and content providers to supply specific content solutions to specific devices. It is becoming more evident that an integrated approach to content generation and delivery is necessary to manage these multiple device types.

Current solutions to mobile services rely, in most cases, on the presence of a browser on the mobile device. New devices will require the provision of small applications (processes) to the mobile device to provide advanced 3G services. Our research is analysing existing delivery and content management techniques, and is designing a solution based on an intelligent client-side agent.

The project is an Innovation Partnership (IP) project co-funded by Enterprise Ireland and MobileAware Ltd. The project is attempting to integrate a definition of an abstract process and the underlying representation(s) on the device. The semantics of a process are captured in an XHTML (eXtensible Hypertext Markup Language) module understandable to both content authors and authoring tools.

The representation on the device is dependant on a number of factors including:

� Application environments supported by the device
� Capabilities of the device browser
� Memory present on the device
� Available bandwidth
� User preferences.

To represent the process on the device, the XHTML tags describing the process must be transformed to markup renderable by the device browser, enabling the user to interact with the process. Each process variant will have a transformation component to convert it to the appropriate device format and will be integrated with MobileAware's Everix (TM) platform.

In order to manage the delivery of requested processes and their required resources and components, it was decided to adopt an approach incorporating the J2EE (Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition) (TM) Client Provisioning technology (JSR - Java Specification Request - 124). To apply the principles of JSR 124 to the particular needs of the project, some extensions to JSR 124 are being defined.

A client-side agent is necessary to administer process delivery and post-delivery management in addition to providing such facilities as:

� Offline usage
� Process, resources and component management.

A number of prototypes are being developed - including agents for notebook, Pocket PC and clients using the Microsoft� .NET (TM) and .NET Compact (TM) frameworks with a server solution implemented in Java (TM).

Contact: Niall Roche & Gary Clynch, Department of Computing, Institute of Technology Tallaght, Dublin 24;
E-mail: [email protected] ; [email protected] :