MobiVine: a middleware layer to handle fragmentation of platform interfaces for mobile applications
نویسندگان
چکیده
Rapid enhancements in computing power, memory, display, etc., have propelled mobile phones as a platform to deploy and execute a variety of applications. To foster creation of rich mobile applications, popular platform vendors such as Android, iPhone and Nokia S60 offer extensive middleware support. This includes not only helping developers code and package their application modules in a format suitable for deployment, but also providing ‘interfaces’ to a) access information on the mobile device (for e.g. user location), and b) invoke device capabilities (like camera), from within the applications. Although usage of such platform interfaces leads to richer modules, it requires the developer to deal with application fragmentation arising due to heterogeneity in syntax, semantics and implementation of these interfaces across different platforms. In this paper, we first look into the problem posed by this fragmentation and characterize it’s uniqueness in the mobile setting. Thereafter, we present ‘M-Proxy’, a semantically structured unit to absorb platform interface heterogeneity, and use it as a building block to develop ‘MobiVine’, a middleware ‘de-fragmentation’ layer for mobile applications. We demonstrate how MobiVine can be seamlessly integrated with existing platform middlewares using the notion of ‘M-Plugins’. We also analyze and evaluate the effectiveness of MobiVine through implementations for three mobile platforms Android, Nokia S60 and Android WebView.
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