Interaction Styles for Service Discovery in Mobile Business Applications

Abstract

As the power of mobile devices continues to grow, and the range of resources accessible via wireless networks expands, there is an increasing need to offer services to users in a customized way, based on their immediate desires and context. At the same time, to construct such applications in a cost-effective and reusable way, there is also a growing pressure on mobile application developers to structure their systems in terms of a service-oriented architecture. However, these two goals are not always compatible. In this paper we present a new set of architectural components and principles which allow context-sensitive, mobile business applications to be assembled in highly flexible and reuse-oriented way based on the principles of SOA. We present the four main configuration patterns and interaction styles which this architecture supports and evaluate their pros and cons from the perspective of different infrastructure and usability issues such as bandwidth usage, latency needs, pricing and, privacy. Finally, we discuss which configuration to use in which circumstances