Dynamic Distributed User Interfaces: Supporting Mobile Interaction Spaces

As the possibilities and popularity of mobile computing devices increases, there is an opportunity to accomplish more and more desktop-related tasks with them. Most tasks require a Graphical User Interface (GUI) that allows users to tap buttons, make selections, fill in forms, etc. Because of the diversity in mobile devices, it is difficult to develop a single GUI that runs on all of these devices. One of the difficulties is the lack of a common platform and/or GUI toolkit. The heterogeneity of platforms and toolkits can be masked by using markup languages to describe an interface on a high level. The use of these description languages is one of the core ideas in this dissertation. Another concern is the adaptation of the GUI to the context of use. Our goals are to clarify what adaptation of an interface involves and why it is important. Since mobile devices have limited screen space and varying input methods, it may be appropriate to split up a GUI and distribute parts to several devices. This poses new challenges such as an efficient distribution mechanism and wireless communication techniques to let the distributed parts talk with each other and the application logic. We present a framework that is able to generate and distribute GUI descriptions for custom applications, that can be rendered on a wide variety of (mobile) devices. The emphasis is on open standards, platform/toolkit/language independence and a light-weight framework.