A Dynamic Evaluation Framework for Mobile Applications

Due to the large variation in capabilities of mobile devices and the lack of true standards, it is hard to develop applications for the mobile environment that will behave similar on all devices and in different environments. This article introduces the concept of a Dynamic Evaluation Framework that uses several different implementations for one specific application. The performance of each implementation is evaluated at runtime ensuring that the optimal implementation is always used. We describe the architecture and discuss the feasibility of the framework. As part of the evaluation we have developed a simple chat application with a seamless connection that evaluates and selects the optimal connection in real time. The evaluation technique is based on GoalQuestion-Metric. The test environment is a J2ME CLDC application that transfers data with Bluetooth and GPRS over the JXTA network.