Supporting Mobile Application Developer through Java IDE Using Contextual Inquiry

Mobile Devices are becoming popular more and more with millions of users acquiring them every day. For instance, in china, there are more than 400 million mobile users and this number is increasing (Young, 2005). Also, the mobile device market in the United States is increasing at an annual rate of 22% (Chen et al, 2003). Devices such as mobile cellular phones, Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), music players etc run Java software such as games and business enterprise applications (Young, 2005). New Prospects are emerging for applications that are running on these devices especially in this post-PC era (Weyert de Boer et al, 2006) where mobile devices are used often for personal use and as commercial tool. This means that application aimed at such devices need to be developed and improved to give way to the construction of new mobile world (Weyert de Boer et al, 2006). However, Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) – such as Eclipse, Visual Studio, NetBeans, Borland JBuilder Enterprise with MobiSet 3, Sun Microsystems' Sun ONE (Open Network Environment) Studio 4 Mobile Edition, Metrowerks CodeWarrior Wireless Studio 7, S5 Systems' jVise (based on IBM Eclipse technology), etc. are tools of choice for developing mobile applications and they are also instrumental in developing individual components for mobile applications (Soroka et al, 2006). With the exception of Visual Studio, these IDEs are all based on Java. Developing mobile applications using any of these development environments is a complex task (Soroka et al, 2006). However, one vision of Java mobile applications developers is to deliver robust and comprehensive applications for various mobile devices that one can easily carry, through using one of the IDEs mentioned above. The popularity of mobile applications and services are now such that this research feels it is time to look at how well mobile applications developers are supported through these existing development tools. This research uses Contextual Inquiry (CI) (Holtzblatt and Beyer, 1997) to investigate how mobile applications developers can be supported through Java IDEs in order to identify problems that are encountered when using Java IDEs to develop mobile applications. We also assess the utility of CI for extracting the design requirements for the IDEs. NetBeans IDE was considered as the ideal IDE to use for this research. This is because it is an open source IDE and it is considered as the most widely used Java IDE for developing mobile applications for mobile devices (Benson et al, 2004). Therefore, this research was interested in finding ways to improve the usability of Java Supporting Mobile Application Developer through Java IDE Using Contextual Inquiry IDEs for mobile applications development and to provide more support for Java mobile applications developers through the IDEs. The techniques of CI recommend observing activities as they occur in their natural context in order to be able to portray the process of the work as well as the discovery of the places where technology could be applied to defeat the observed difficulties (Cross and Warmack, 2000). This method was chosen because it would provide data about the detailed problems faced by Java mobile applications developers when using a Java IDE to develop mobile applications and it will also provide guidance on the design of the support framework (Jones and Marsden, 2005; Preece et al, 2007)

Supporting Mobile Developers through A Java IDE

There exist several challenges in supporting mobile applications. For example, creating a separate target application for each device type, leaving developers with a huge maintenance chore. Most desktop applications run on largely homogenous hardware so instead of writing the same code over and over again, developers only need to write modules to implement a particular need. This is because even though there are differences in PC hardware configurations, the same desktop application will work fine on any hardware as the operating system provides an abstract layer. This is the way mobile applications are expected to work. However, this has been divided into dozens of ill-assorted versions. Java mobile applications developers spend more time rewriting code to run on different versions of mobile devices more than they do actually creating application in the first place. This is an intolerable burden for small mobile developers, and it stifles mobile software innovation overall. Mobile devices differ in a variety of attributes, such as screen size, colour depth and the optional hardware devices they support such as cameras, GPS etc. The differences often require special code or project settings for successful deployment for each device a developer is targeting but this creates a huge logistical overhead. One potential solution that is shipped with NetBeans IDE is to add a new configuration for each device, modify the project properties, add some pre-processing code, then build and deploy the application. In most cases, one configuration for each distribution of the Java Archive (JAR) one plans to build for the project is created. For example, if a developer is planning to support three different screen sizes using two sets of vendor specific APIs, one needs to create six configurations. This reduces the performance of the application drastically and increases the size at the same time. This is not acceptable for mobile devices where memory size and processor performance are limited. The goal of this research work is to support mobile application development through a Java IDE (the NetBeans IDE in this case). Therefore, our approach will be to modify the NetBeans IDE to better address the difficulty that was mentioned above – namely targeting applications for different platforms. Our solution is to integrate another type of a preprocessor into the NetBeans IDE that will help alleviate the problems of the existing tool. Our approach is to directly implement this inside the NetBeans IDE to further support mobile application development with the NetBeans IDE

Supporting Mobile Applications Developer through Java IDE Using Contextual Inquiry

Contextual Inquiry (CI) is a method developed by Beyer and Holtzblatt for grounding design in the context of work being performed by user(s). This paper is about identify ways of improving the usability of Java Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) for developing mobile applications. We also describe our approach of this method to support mobile application developers, through the use of an IDE (NetBeans IDE in the context of this research). CI provides useful data on the typical problems found in various tools for developing mobile applications on which our design ideas were based. The data that was collected from this method was subjected to further analysis and quantification, beyond what Beyer and Holtzblatt suggested as well as a way to defend the potential usefulness of mobile IDE for mobile applications development

A software development framework for context-aware systems

The beginning of the new century has been characterised by the miniaturisation and accessibility of electronics, which has enabled its widespread usage around the world. This technological background is progressively materialising the future of the remainder of the century, where industry-based societies have been moving towards information-based societies. Information from users and their environment is now pervasively available, and many new research areas have born in order to shape the potential of such advancements. Particularly, context-aware computing is at the core of many areas such as Intelligent Environments, Ambient Intelligence, Ambient Assisted Living or Pervasive Computing. Embedding contextual awareness into computers promises a fundamental enhancement in the interaction between computers and humans. While traditional computers require explicit commands in order to operate, contextually aware computers could also use information from the background and the users to provide services according to the situation. But embedding this contextual awareness has many unresolved challenges. The area of context-aware computing has attracted the interest of many researchers that have presented different approaches to solve particular aspects on the implementation of this technology. The great corpus of research in this direction indicates that context-aware systems have different requirements than those of traditional computing. Approaches for developing context-aware systems are typically scattered or do not present compatibility with other approaches. Existing techniques for creating context-aware systems also do not focus on covering all the different stages of a typical software development life-cycle. The contribution of this thesis is towards the foundation layers of a more holistic approach, that tries to facilitate further research on the best techniques for developing these kinds of systems. The approach presents a framework to support the development not only with methodologies, but with open-source tools that facilitate the implementation of context-aware systems in mobile and stationary platforms

Personalization platform for multimodal ubiquitous computing applications

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia InformáticaWe currently live surrounded by a myriad of computing devices running multiple applications. In general, the user experience on each of those scenarios is not adapted to each user’s specific needs, without personalization and integration across scenarios. Moreover, developers usually do not have the right tools to handle that in a standard and generic way. As such, a personalization platform may provide those tools. This kind of platform should be readily available to be used by any developer. Therefore, it must be developed to be available over the Internet. With the advances in IT infrastructure, it is now possible to develop reliable and scalable services running on abstract and virtualized platforms. Those are some of the advantages of cloud computing, which offers a model of utility computing where customers are able to dynamically allocate the resources they need and are charged accordingly. This work focuses on the creation of a cloud-based personalization platform built on a previously developed generic user modeling framework. It provides user profiling and context-awareness tools to third-party developers. A public display-based application was also developed. It provides useful information to students, teachers and others in a university campus as they are detected by Bluetooth scanning. It uses the personalization platform as the basis to select the most relevant information in each situation, while a mobile application was developed to be used as an input mechanism. A user study was conducted to assess the usefulness of the application and to validate some design choices. The results were mostly positive

Using a test automation tool for robotic process automation: An empirical study

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) uses software robots that interact with systems through their user interface, reducing costs and improving efficiency in automating processes. Despite being a recent term, it is being progressively adopted in companies, being used in many areas, such as IT, Insurance and Human Resources. Although RPA is relatively inexpensive to implement, the cost of licensing is high. To reduce costs, there are open source tools that might be capable of automating process, despite being used for other purposes, such as Test Automation. Therefore, this research aims to test if it is feasible to use a Test Automation tool to automate business processes and identify advantages and disadvantages of using a Test Automation tool as a RPA tool. To accomplish that, a Case Study (CS) was performed in a real company where the same business process was automated, using both a Test Automation tool and a RPA tool. This research presents the comparison analysis and results of an experiment designed with two approaches: a Test Automation tool vs a RPA tool. The results show that despite there were some challenges of using a Test Automation to automate the selected process than with a RPA tool, using Test Automation tools may be useful for companies with low financial resources that aim to find low cost alternatives to RPA tools to automate processes, taking into account the advantages and disadvantages of using a Test Automation tool as a RPA tool provided in this research.Robotic Process Automation (RPA) utiliza software robots que interagem com os sistemas através da sua interface gráfica, reduzindo custos e melhorando a eficiência na automação de processos. Apesar de ser um termo recente, está a ser cada vez mais usado nas empresas, sendo usado em várias áreas, como o IT, seguradoras e recursos humanos. Embora o RPA tenha um custo relativamente baixo de implementação, o custo das licenças é elevado. Para reduzir custos, há ferramentas open source que podem ser capazes de automatizar processos, apesar de serem usadas para outros fins, como Test Automation. Consequentemente, esta investigação pretende testar se é possível usar uma ferramenta de Test Automation para automação de processos e identificar vantagens e desvantagens de usar uma ferramenta de Test Automation como ferramenta de RPA. Esta investigação apresenta a análise da comparação e resultados de uma experiência feita com duas abordagens: uma ferramenta de Test Automation e uma ferramenta de RPA. Os resultados mostram que apesar de terem sido identificados mais desafios ao usar uma ferramenta de Test Automation na automação do processo escolhido do que ao usar uma ferramenta de RPA, o uso de ferramentas de Test Automation pode ser útil em empresas com poucos recursos financeiros que procuram alternativas low cost às ferramentas de RPA para automação de processos, tendo em conta as vantagens e desvantagens do uso de uma ferramenta de Test Automation como ferramenta de RPA descritas nesta investigação