An adaptive and unified mobile application development framework for Java

Abstract

Although wireless networks and mobile devices have become prevalent, the diversity of mobile devices and unsteadiness of wireless networks still cause software development much trouble. In addition, the variety of services in Internet or Intranet, such as Web services, UPnP services, Jini services and so on, will also increase the difficulty in using them. Thus, when developing a mobile application to access these services, developers are forced to expose to these problems and therefore it will spend much time writing a mobile application. Although many studies on user interface adaptation and language transformation have attempted to solve the problems, most of them do not consider the computing power and functionalities of end-devices. As a result, some resources are ignored or wasted. To solve above problems, an adaptive framework, named GMA, is proposed to help developers build mobile applications quickly and easily. GMA framework can tailor an application to fit different devices according to not only user interface formats but also the computing power and functionalities of the devices. Besides, a universal service interface is proposed and developers can use a unified API to access different backend-services. As a result, a mobile application developed on GMA can enjoy the "write once, run everywhere, and access anything" benefit.