Building Reflective Mobile Middleware Framework on Top of the OSGi Platform

The literature on mobile middleware is extensive. Numerous aspects of the mobility’s effect on middleware have been analysed and the amount of previous work allowed to identify the most important patterns. Although the notion of “most important middleware” depends on the application supported by the middleware, there are traits that can be discovered in most of the connected mobile applications. Based on the experience of several authors, these traits are context-awareness, reflectivity, support for off-line operation and asynchronous (messagebased) communication. This paper presents a mobile middleware system built to support these patterns and demonstrates, how the OSGi service platform can be used to realize these patterns. It will be demonstrated that although OSGi was built to support manageability requirements, the resulting platform is suitable for implementing the 4 major middleware patterns too. The paper presents the components of this context-aware, reflective middleware framework and evaluates its footprint.