ClayUI: A Framework for Delivering Object Properties to Native Mobile Application Components

As technology advances in the field of mobile computing with smartphones and tablet computers becoming less expensive, people are adopting these devices into their daily lives. Due to this adoption, many developers are finding opportunities to develop apps that target this growing form factor. One of the issues that developers come across when developing for these multiple platforms is that there is a need to redesign common elements of their applications for each of their platforms. They are also challenged with the decision of breaking the prescribed design guidelines for each of the platforms they are developing for so that they are able to provide support for these applications in the future. In this thesis, we propose a solution to this problem by generalizing common user interface elements and configure them outside of the application. Our solution, called ClayUI, uses a client server model to house and publish user interface elements to a mobile application using an API that is written in the target platform’s native programming language. Our solution allows a developer to create a mobile application that adheres to the platform’s design guidelines with the flexibility of being able to port it to other platforms without having to do a full redesign of the application. Our solution also introduces features that assist the developer with the process of creating local and remote database storage for the configured elements

Overcoming middleware heterogeneity in mobile computing applications

Recent technical advances have fuelled the popularity of mobile computing. Mobile devices such as smart phones and personal digital assistants are becoming more commonly used due to the reduction in their size and increase of computational power. In addition, wireless network hotspots (in airports, hotels and commercial outlets) are now beginning to populate the environment. With these advances, new types of mobile applications are becoming available to support users on the move. The mobile environment presents a number of challenges to application developers (including frequent network disconnection and variable bandwidth); therefore mobile middleware platforms have emerged to simplify the development process of distributed mobile applications. However, the range of platforms now available introduces the new problem of middleware heterogeneity, i.e., applications developed upon different types of middleware do not interoperate with one another. Hence, the next generation of mobile computing applications must be developed independently of specific middleware implementation to allow them to continue interoperating in new locations. This thesis investigates the problem of middleware heterogeneity in the mobile computing environment. The approach taken to solve this problem involves the development of a component-based, higher-level middleware framework (named ReMMoC) that can dynamically adapt its underlying behaviour between different concrete middleware implementations e.g. in one location CORBA is utilised, whereas at the next location SOAP is used. Furthermore, this framework promotes a higher-level programming abstraction based upon the abstract services concepts of the Web Services Architecture. The ReMMoC framework is evaluated to ensure that middleware transparency is achieved and that applications can be developed that will operate in unknown locations across unpredictable middleware implementation. Inevitably, the ability to overcome heterogeneity comes at the cost of an incurred performance overhead; hence, this thesis also evaluates the impact of this overhead in the domain of mobile computing