行動混搭應用程式的API整合服務系統

Abstract

近年來，由於WIFI與3G行動網路的普及和智慧型手機的迅速崛起，使得越來越多手機用戶透過智慧型手機上網。 智慧型手機提供了豐富且具有特色的功能，其中最受矚目的就是手機應用程式(APP)，透過行動網路或無線網路(Wi-Fi) 結合影音撥放與照相等功能提供多元化服務，通常為了達到個人化的服務，許多混搭型應用程式都會使用網頁應用程式介面(Web APIs) 來取得所需要的資訊。我們可以發現到網頁應用程式介面的服務提供商急遽增加，連帶影響手機混搭應用程式數量的成長，隨著服務提 供商的增加，開發者就必須先去了解每個服務取得資源的方法以及處理各種不同的格式的回應，另一方面混搭應用程式蒐集不同來源的 多媒體內容通常會造成大量的網路傳輸，在行動數據連線當中大量的資料傳輸會造成整體網路品質大幅下降，使用者也須負擔較多的資料 傳輸費用。除此之外，使用API方法時回應的結果通常會包含有豐富且完整的資訊，但對於手機應用程式而言卻是多餘且冗長的資訊， 這對於計算能力有限的智慧型手機而言應該是要盡量避免的。因此我們提出了一個整合性的多媒體API服務管理系統來為混搭應用程式 達到可以藉由精確的資料傳輸，簡易的取得所需資源。因應多變的網路環境與克服不同裝置所造成的限制，本管理系統主要訴求是建立 一致性的資料表示法或服務描述，透過良好設計的存取方式取得所需的資源，因此著重於系統化地儲存與管理分散於網路的資源，建立 具有擴充性的整合多媒體服務平台。

Recently, mobile Mashup application have gained increased attention due to widespread deployment of WiFi and 3G networks and the proliferation of smartphones. The number of smartphone users has been rapidly increasing due to the rich and advanced features of smartphones. Mobile Mashup applications is a fascinating feature of the smartphone which provide specialized services and attractive GUIs. Web API can promote practicability and efficiency of the mobile Mushup application. However, because of the large number of Web APIs and the diversity of Web API formats, it is difficult for the developers to fully utilize Web API resources to create mobile Mashup applications. Besides, invoking Web API methods usually results in large transfer size that is prohibitive for energy-constrained smartphones. Accordingly, we present a keyword search mechanism to allow developers to easily specify the API resources of interest without studying various and complicated API methods or create a resource on the Web Service in a consistent way. In addition, we design an effective index structure for managing the wide variety of Web APIs from websites. With the index structure, the search for corresponding API methods can be accelerated and thus the response time could be reduced. To eliminate redundant information of API results as well as reduce computational cost for mobile Mashup applications, we introduce a JSON transformation to return the only the desired information in concise JSON format. Aiming to overcome these issues, we propose a novel integrated API service system to enable mobile Mashup applications to readily aggregate the desired resources with a smaller transfer size. The experimental results show that the proposed system significantly reduce the transfer size, the response time and energy consumption of mobile Mashup applications.