Places to stay on the move: Software architectures for mobile user interfaces

Architectural design has an important effect on usability, most notably on temporal properties. This paper investigates software architecture options for mobile user interfaces, in particular those for collaborative systems. One of the new features of mobile systems, as compared with fixed networks, is the connection point to the physical network, the point of presence (PoP), which forms an additional location for code and data. This allows architectures that bring computation closer to the users, hence reducing feedback and feedthrough delays. A consequence of using PoPs is that code and data have to be mobile within the network, leading to potential security problems.     

The performance impact of traffic patterns on routing protocols in mobile ad hoc networks

As mobile ad hoc network (MANET) systems research has matured and several testbeds have been built to study MANETs, research has focused on developing new MANET applications such as collaborative games, collaborative computing, messaging systems, distributed security schemes, MANET middleware, peer-to-peer file sharing systems, voting systems, resource management and discovery, vehicular computing and collaborative education systems. The growing set of diverse applications developed for MANETs pose far more complex traffic patterns than the simple one-to-one traffic pattern, and hence the one-to-one traffic pattern widely used in previous protocol studies has become inadequate in reflecting the relative performance of these protocols when deployed to support these emerging applications.As a first step towards effectively supporting newly developed and future diverse MANET applications, this paper studies the performance impact of diverse traffic patterns on routing protocols in MANETs. Specifically, we propose a new communication model that extends the previous communication model to include a more general traffic pattern that varies the number of connections per source node. We study the performance impact of traffic patterns on various routing protocols via detailed simulations of an ad hoc network of 112 mobile nodes. Our simulation results show that many of the conclusions drawn in previous protocol comparison studies no longer hold under the new traffic patterns. These results motivate the need for performance evaluation of ad hoc networks to not only include rich and diverse mobility models as has been done in the past but also include diverse traffic patterns that stress a wide set of protocol design issues.     

Collaborative design: Improving efficiency by concurrent execution of Boolean tasks

Computer-Aided Design (CAD) applications provide design and engineering professionals with various computer-based tools to perform design activities. As efficiency is one of the most important requirements in most design tasks, in this article, we contribute a novel collaborative design approach to improving efficiency, where a complex design task can be divided and executed concurrently by multiple collaborative designers. This approach is particularly effective for design tasks where Boolean operations – widely supported by most CAD applications – are heavily used in design activities, such as architecture design, mechanical design and digital media design. We have designed and implemented a prototype system CoAutoCAD to test the approach and to demonstrate a variety of collaborative design activities.     

An Integrated Approach to Designing and Evaluating Collaborative Applications and Infrastructures

Collaborative systems include both general infrastructures and specific applications for supporting collaboration. Because of the relative newness and complexity of these systems, it has been unclear what approach should be used to design and evaluate them. Based on the lessons learned from our work and that of others on collaborative systems, we have derived an integrated approach to researching collaborative applications and infrastructures. The approach can be described as a sequence of steps: We decompose the functionality of collaboration systems into smaller functions that can be researched more-or-less independently. For each of these functions, we adopt general (system-independent) principles regarding the design and implementation of the function, identify collaboration scenarios at multiple levels of abstraction, identify requirements based on the scenarios, adopt an interaction model to meet the requirements, realize the interaction model as a concrete user interface, develop a logical architecture of the system, identify a physical architecture for placing the logical components in a distributed system, develop infrastructure abstractions, use the abstractions to implement applications, and perform lab studies, field experiments, and simulations to evaluate the infrastructure and applications. As in other models with multiple phases, feedback from subsequent phases is used to modify the results from the previous phases. In this paper, we describe, illustrate and motivate this research plan.     

A custom collaboration service system for idea management of mobile phone design

Customized collaborative service (CCS) systems are defined as the e‐services transforming a business process into a collaborative service model and aiming to facilitate interactions with customers and assist the providers in dealing with collaborative strategies and activities. The demand for such services has grown rapidly in a shift of people out of the manufacturing mindset into the service‐dominant mindset. For example, the mobile‐phone market now tends to customization rather than commoditization, and customer‐driven design strategies increasingly substitute for technology‐driven design strategies. This trend accordingly urges the mobile‐phone companies to center on a customer‐centric idea management process to assure customer idea originality but also sustain the process feasibility for realistic product design. However, a method to engineer such CCS systems has not been addressed. This article presents a prototype system named iMobileDesign to exemplify a CCS system. We present a new methodology to engineer this CCS system aiming to achieve semiautomated value coproduction with productivity and satisfaction. This method comprises two parts: simple service machine (SSM) and intelligent service machine (ISM). Usage of SSM and ISM would lead to the formation of analysis and design of the CCS system that joins the service provider efforts with their customers for ensuring a customer‐centric idea management process. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

基于Java ME和Java EE的移动商务系统设计与实现

随着移动通信广泛应用和电子商务技术的成熟壮大,移动商务已经具备了发展的基础条件,电子商务逐渐向移动商务迁移,但移动商务服务领域仍很薄弱.本文针对移动商务环境,提出了一种基于Java ME和Java EE的移动商务系统架构,并进行系统分析与设计,采用Eclipse、WTK等开发工具编程实现,经过实验证明该系统能够有效地实现移动商务处理,该架构和开发技术可以应用于移动商务服务系统以及其他移动应用系统的构建.     

How the Web is used to support collaborative writing

We present 19 systems that have been developed over the past decade to support collaborative writing over the Web. The aim of this article is to present the state of the art on the use of the Web for collaborative writing and thus (1) help designers improve current systems or define future systems, and (2) help users choose the most appropriate system to support their needs. Among available systems, groups can select from tools to write a document (on- or off-line), collect comments about a document, or maintain a Web site. The lack of experimental data concerning Web-based applications forces designers to use other sources of information to guide their design choices, such as a list of functions that an ideal collaborative writing tool should offer. This list has revealed several potential points for improvement.     

Mobile collaborative medical display system

Because of recent advances in wireless communication technologies, the world of mobile computing is flourishing with a variety of applications. In this study, we present an integrated architecture for a personal digital assistant (PDA)-based mobile medical display system that supports collaborative work between remote users. We aim to develop a system that enables users in different regions to share a working environment for collaborative visualization with the potential for exploring huge medical datasets. Our system consists of three major components: mobile client, gateway, and parallel rendering server. The mobile client serves as a front end and enables users to choose the visualization and control parameters interactively and cooperatively. The gateway handles requests and responses between mobile clients and the rendering server for efficient communication. Through the gateway, it is possible to share working environments between users, allowing them to work together in computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) mode. Finally, the parallel rendering server is responsible for performing heavy visualization tasks. Our experience indicates that some features currently available to our mobile clients for collaborative scientific visualization are limited due to the poor performance of mobile devices and the low bandwidth of wireless connections. However, as mobile devices and wireless network systems are experiencing considerable elevation in their capabilities, we believe that our methodology will be utilized effectively in building quite responsive, useful mobile collaborative medical systems in the very near future.     

A lightweight and distributed middleware to provide presence awareness in mobile ubiquitous systems

Several researchers have identified the need to count on presence awareness in ubiquitous systems that support mobile activities, particularly when these systems are used to perform loosely-coupled mobile work. In such a work style, mobile users conduct face-to-face on-demand interactions, therefore counting on awareness information about the position and availability of potential collaborators becomes mandatory for these applications. Most proposed solutions that provide user presence awareness involve centralized components, have reusability limitations, or simply address a part of that service. This article presents a lightweight and fully distributed middleware named Moware, which allows developers to embed presence awareness services in mobile ubiquitous systems in a simple way. The article also describes the Moware architecture, its main components and strategies used to deal with several aspects of the presence awareness support. These design strategies can be reused by software designers to provide presence awareness capabilities into middleware and specific software applications. Moware services were embedded in a mobile ubiquitous system that supports inspectors during the construction inspection process. The preliminary results indicate that the middleware was easy to use for developers, and its services were useful for the end-users.     

A unified methodology for the evaluation of accessibility and usability of mobile applications

This article reports a unified methodology developed to evaluate the accessibility and usability of mobile computing applications, which is intended to guarantee universal access as far as possible. As a basis for the methodology, this paper presents an analysis of the accessibility guidelines, conducted to take into account the specificity of mobile systems, as well as a set of usability heuristics, specifically devised for mobile computing. Finally, it presents the results of the application of the proposed methodology to applications that have been semi-automatically developed by the MAIS Designer, a new design tool that provides applications suited to different mobile devices.     

How the Web is used to support collaborative writing

We present 19 systems that have been developed over the past decade to support collaborative writing over the Web. The aim of this article is to present the state of the art on the use of the Web for collaborative writing and thus (1) help designers improve current systems or define future systems, and (2) help users choose the most appropriate system to support their needs. Among available systems, groups can select from tools to write a document (on- or off-line), collect comments about a document, or maintain a Web site. The lack of experimental data concerning Web-based applications forces designers to use other sources of information to guide their design choices, such as a list of functions that an ideal collaborative writing tool should offer. This list has revealed several potential points for improvement.     

Making Augmented Reality Practical on Mobile Phones, Part 1

Since 2003, the authors have been developing three generations of a software framework for handheld augmented reality (AR), targeting mobile phones. This article is the first part of a discussion on the experiences and design decisions that resulted in the current software framework, Studierstube ES (Embedded System). The authors describe the restrictions of the mobile phone platform and a software architecture that allows fast development of mobile phone AR applications.     

A service-oriented city portal framework and collaborative development platform

Cities are being equipped with multiple information systems to provide public services for city officials, officers, citizens, and tourists. There have been concerns with efficient service implementation and provision, e.g., data islands and function overlaps between systems and applications. Service-oriented portals are efficient at facilitating information sharing and collaborative work between city systems and users. The goal of this research is to make cities responsive, agile and to provide composite services efficiently and cost efficiently. A service-oriented framework for city portals is proposed to design, integrate and streamline city systems and applications. A model driven collaborative development platform of the proposed framework was developed for service-oriented digital portals. The architecture and implementation issues of the platform are discussed. The service identification policies are discussed within the framework. A case study has been developed and evaluated on the platform to provide a composite service, i.e., a traffic search service on a city portal.     

An accelerator design for speedup of Java execution in consumer mobile devices

In today’s consumer electronics market, Java has become one of the most important programming languages for the rapid development of mobile applications – spanning from home appliances/controllers, mobile and communication devices, to network-centric applets. However, the demand for high-performance low-power Java-based consumer mobile applications puts forward new challenges to the system design and implementation. This paper analyzes the energy consumption, execution efficiency, and speed issues of Java applications in a typical consumer mobile device environment. By adopting a hardware-assisted approach, we introduce a Java accelerator with a companion Java virtual machine. The accelerator is designed in an asynchronous style, and can be integrated with most existing processors and operating systems. The core architecture, design philosophy, and implementation considerations are presented in detail in this paper.     

A case base of Case-Based Design tools for architecture

In the 1990s, Case-Based Design (CBD) seemed an appealing approach to develop intelligent design support. Based on an alternative view of human cognition, CBD systems find new design solutions by adapting similar experiences from the past. Although several CBD applications have been built, a convincing breakthrough by these systems has yet to come. In search of reasons for this limited success, this article embarks on a critical review of the CBD approach. Its underlying cognitive model serves as a framework to analyse six CBD systems and to identify gaps in CBD research. The article focuses primarily on CBD applications for architecture, yet the findings may be relevant for other design domains as well.     

A Testbed for Mobile Multimedia Applications

This article describes the architecture, design and implementation of a mobile network emulator able to enhance development of mobile multimedia applications. In particular, it generates test situations which otherwise could be encountered only by moving around the equipment to be tested.     

Component-based tailorability: Enabling highly flexible software applications

Component technologies are perceived as an important means to keep software architectures flexible. Flexibility offered by component technologies typically addresses software developers at design time. However, the design of software which should support social systems, such as work groups or communities, also demands ‘use-time’, or technically spoken, ‘run-time’ flexibility. In this paper, we summarize a decade of research efforts on component-based approaches to flexibilize groupware applications at run-time. We address the user as a ‘casual programmer’ who develops and individualizes software for his work context. To deal with the challenges of run-time flexibility, we developed a design approach which covers three levels: software architecture, user interface, and collaboration support. With regard to the software architecture, a component model, called FlexiBeans, has been developed. The FreEvolve platform serves as an environment in which component-based applications can be tailored at run-time. Additionally, we have developed three different types of graphical user interfaces, enabling users to tailor their applications by recomposing components. To enable collaborative tailoring activities, we have integrated functions that allow sharing component structures among users. We also present different types of support techniques which are integrated into the user interface in order to enable users’ individual and collaborative tailoring activities. We conclude by elaborating on the notion of ‘software infrastructure’ which offers a holistic approach to support design activities of professional and non-professional programmers.     

Using Mobile Communication Devices to Access Virtual Meeting Spaces

This contribution addresses the integration of mobile devices with limited display and interaction capabilities into a multi-user system for tele-conferencing and collaborative work. We first report on a recently conducted case study in which we used a simulation environment to investigate how a small group of geographically dispersed users can jointly solve localisation and route planning tasks when equipped with communication devices that essentially differ with regard to available input and output capabilities. We then present a system architecture that includes gateway components as interfaces between the mobile devices and one or more interactive applications. Finally, we argue that there is a high demand for automated design approaches which are able to generate information presentations that are tailored to the available presentation capabilities of particular target devices.     

A methodology for engineering collaborative and ad-hoc mobile applications using SyD middleware

Today’s web applications are more collaborative and utilize standard and ubiquitous Internet protocols. We have earlier developed System on Mobile Devices (SyD) middleware to rapidly develop and deploy collaborative applications over heterogeneous and possibly mobile devices hosting web objects. In this paper, we present the software engineering methodology for developing SyD-enabled web applications and illustrate it through a case study on two representative applications: (i) a calendar of meeting application, which is a collaborative application and (ii) a travel application which is an ad-hoc collaborative application. SyD-enabled web objects allow us to create a collaborative application rapidly with limited coding effort. In this case study, the modular software architecture allowed us to hide the inherent heterogeneity among devices, data stores, and networks by presenting a uniform and persistent object view of mobile objects interacting through XML/SOAP requests and responses. The performance results we obtained show that the application scales well as we increase the group size and adapts well within the constraints of mobile devices.