1.1 Preface
Nowadays, almost every pedestrian carried about one mobile device at least.
These mobile devices such as mobile phone, Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), notebook, etc. are rapidly proliferating with miscellaneous functions. Within these functions, the Internet connectivity has significant influence since the mobile devices can either execute various applications online or download the applications to execute while offline. The first type of application is called “Mobile Web Application” while the second type is called “Mobile Application”. Since these two types of applications have many things in common, the demand of writing application once and executing it no matter online or offline increases. The researches for an integrated development toolkit which targets on authoring applications for multiple mobile devices starts to grow.
PUML (Pervasive User-interface Markup Language) [1] is an XML-based language which describes a generic user-interface for the mobile application in the abstract level. It can be transformed into various languages by using multiple XSLT [2]
style sheets. The target languages currently are manipulated in XHTML-MP [3], WML [4], and J2ME MIDP [5], and they are all executable in the mobile environment.
Based on the PUML transformation framework, visualizing the user-interface presentation of PUML and providing an integrated development environment will be targeted in this thesis.
1.2 Motivation
Figure 1-1: The concept of combining mobile application and mobile Web application.
Nowadays, there are many existing toolkits for authoring multi-device Web applications such as IBM Everyplace toolkit for WebSphere Studio [6] and Microsoft ASP .NET Web Matrix [7]. However, none of them provides the ability to author once and generate both offline mobile applications and online mobile Web applications.
Authoring applications becomes a time-consuming work; therefore, it motivates us to combine the development of both types of applications through authoring a single generic application interface. Figure 1-1 draws a picture about this concept. The single generic application interface is based on the XML-based mobile application development kit [1] from our laboratory (DCSLab of CIS NCTU), it proposed PUML as the user-interface transformation matrix, our toolkit can therefore adopt this language to achieve the goal of writing once, and generating both types of applications. Furthermore, for the sake of giving developers an easy-to-use and integrated development environment, our toolkit is integrated into a mature toolkit to gain more usability in accelerating the development process.
Visualized Authoring Toolkit Generic Application Description
Mobile Application Mobile Web Application
Web Server
Mobile Browser Mobile Devices
1.3 Research Objective
The research objectives can be categorized into the following four categories:
Rapidly development
Since PUML is not widely understood by every developer, the PUML document is visualized into a composition of graphical user-interface widgets. Developers therefore do not need to hand-write the PUML source code. The visualized toolkit tries to give developers a “What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG)” interface which can be used to generate corresponding PUML source code. This approach makes developers who do not comprehend the PUML specification can still author a PUML document. Furthermore, intuitive drag-and-drop operations are adopted over the entire toolkit to compose the application user-interface as easy as possible.
Extensibility
Extensibility always plays an important role in software component reuse. For instance, once the PUML specification revises in the future, the extensible toolkit can be updated simply through replacing some components. Moreover, once a new transformation style sheet is released, the extensible toolkit can also add it to generate a new language. Furthermore, new mobile simulators are to come out, the toolkit should provide a way for adding them to increase the toolkit usability.
Integration
There are existing toolkits which provide tons of features in shortening the development time. Integrating with one of these mature toolkits can utilize their features and provide an integrated development environment at the same time.
Write once; generate multiple application user-interfaces
Authoring multiple applications with the same functionalities is annoying and time-consuming, we try to save development time by writing a single generic application based on PUML and then generating the user-interface and logic skeleton of both mobile application and mobile Web application. The efforts of authoring applications for multiple mobile devices can therefore be simplified.
1.4 Research Contribution
A toolkit is designed and implemented based on these objectives, there are many problems encountered in the process. This paper provides not only solutions to these problems but also a new blueprint of the authoring approach. Four major contributions of this paper are listed below:
1. A toolkit is crafted to visualize the PUML document and carried with some easy-to-use operations in a manner of editing operations.
2. The toolkit architecture is designed and constructed to be extensible.
3. The toolkit is integrated in the leading Java development software - Borland JBuilder [8]. The integration process is also discussed and detailed for referencing.
4. Three formats of languages are generated from a single PUML document to form both mobile application and mobile Web application.
1.5 Outline of the Thesis
In Chapter 2, background and related works of developing the visualized toolkit is introduced. In Chapter 3, components of the toolkit and the new authoring approach for multiple mobile devices are depicted through vivid pictures. In Chapter 4,
architecture of the toolkit is described to give an overview over the entire toolkit. In Chapter 5, implementations and problems encountered are detailed. In Chapter 6, we dwell on conclusions and future works for referencing.