Applications and Service Platforms For Mobile User

Roland Piquepaille writes "ERCIM News is a quarterly publication from the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics. The July 2003 issue is dedicated to research about applications and service platforms for the mobile user. All of the 30 articles are available online. This column details the special constraints applying to the design of these applications: special interfaces, lack of power and memory, and interoperability between heterogeneous networks. In this longer column, you'll find a selection of stories, including links, abstracts and illustrations. Among other projects, you'll discover mBlog, "a mobile information service for all," or Fluid Computing, a middleware which lets "an application 'flow' from one user interface to another.""

Comments

Bigger Issue...

[mgcsinc]

While I recognize that it lacks relevance in the frame of the ERCIM newsletter, there is one particular problem plaguing mobile application and service providers: actual potential use by the customer himself. Issues such as special interfaces and differing platforms can be seen as unique design opportunities as well as challenges, and small availability of power, processing, and memory may be viewed as opportunities to weed out needlessly consuming code, but the general reluctance of even the most sophisticated enterprise users to take advantage of every mobile tool available - due both to the expense of mobile hardware and software systems and lack of true need for such tools - will remain a considerably more insurmountable obstacle for developers...

Re:Bigger Issue...

[Surak]

Lack of true need?

When the personal computer revolution hit, there was a lack of a true need for PCs. Nothing that could be done on the early PCs at that time couldn't be done with some other method -- whether manual or electronic.

It came down the killer app. And the killer app was spreadsheets. Nobody in the business world could IMAGINE this day getting by without a spreadsheet.

The Internet wasn't needed either. The killer app -- universal e-mail. Our mail server went down on Friday and there was MASS PANIC! OMG! NO E-MAIL! WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO????

Strange how people seemed to exist before passing around memos and whatnot, isn't it? :)

Re:Fluid computing???

[GlassUser]

Eh, not hardly. Think serializing a data stream while it's in use and farming it off to the same application running on a different system. It even works well on different architectures as long as the binaries read the same memory map the same way (watch out for low- vs high-endian issue, primarily).