MoTaskit: a personal task-centric tool for service accesses from mobile phones

ABSTRACT

As the capabilities of mobile phones increase, so does the demand for mobile business data. Users may now wish to access backend services on the go, with a mobile phone rather than a laptop. But even as mobile technologies have grown by leaps and bounds in recent years, mobile phones are still under intrinsic hardware constraints, and more importantly, the environment in which a mobile phone is used is completely different from that of a traditional PC/laptop client. This obliges us to come up with a new approach in providing backend service accesses from mobile phones. This paper proposes, and illustrates the use of, a task-centric tool (Mo-Taskit) that is lightweight, agile, tailorable to the user's needs and secure. Central to our approach is the middleware, which adapts backend services to mobile capacity by providing simplified versions of the services. The tool fulfills the goal of providing a lightweight and customizable solution by a) mitigating the responsibilities of the mobile user, b) handling backend service calls in an asynchronous fashion to alleviate the dependence on a network connection that can be intermittent, c) employing service functions in the form of user-defined sequences as means for users to interact with the backend, and d) guaranteeing security.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.4 Distributed Systems
          Subjects: Distributed applications

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.7 Distribution, Maintenance, and Enhancement
          Subjects: Portability

General Terms:
Design

Keywords:
mobile middleware, mobile task, user-centric personalization