MobMid'08 Keynote Talk

Creating a Mobile Web Application Platform: The Lively Kernel Experiences

Tommi Mikkonen, tjm@cs.tut.fi
Department of Software Systems
Tampere U of Tech, Tampere, Finland

Abstract

The software industry is currently in the middle of two transitions: towards web-based software and towards web-enabled mobile devices. Combined, the effect of these disruptions can lead to one of the most fundamental changes in computing by providing a mobile access to all the data and services the Internet has to offer.

Currently there are still major obstacles to the widespread use of mobile web applications, including network bandwidth or cost issues, CPU performance problems, memory capacity and screen size limitations. Therefore, many web services and applications that run well in a desktop browser are next to unusable in a mobile device, even if the technical capabilities needed for executing the applications (such as a mobile web browser with the necessary plug-in components and libraries) were available in the mobile device.

However, we believe that in the long run the sheer popularity of mobile devices (there are already nearly three billion mobile device users today) will eventually lead us to a common web application platform that can be used with different types of terminals, including desktop computers and mobile devices.

In this talk, we summarize our experiences in porting the Sun Labs Lively Kernel (an interactive web programming environment developed at Sun Microsystems Laboratories) onto a Nokia N810 mobile device. We report our experiences based on two different approaches. First, we ported the system onto a regular web browser running in the mobile device. Second, we developed a custom-built native execution environment that provides more direct and extensive access to the underlying resources of the system. Based on these experiments, we will discuss the lessons learned as well as provide directions and guidance for future work.

Author Biography Prof. Tommi Mikkonen is a professor of software engineering for distributed software applications at Tampere University of Technology. He is a well-known expert in the area of mobile computing, and has arranged numerous courses and seminars on the topic. He has also published a book on mobile software development with John Wiley & Sons, published early 2007.

During 2006-2008, Mikkonen has been on a two-year sabbatical with Sun Microsystems Laboratories, where he has been working on Sun Labs Lively Kernel , a self-supporting system that comes live off from a web page. In the project, he's role has been to address issues associated with porting the system to mobile devices.