DEVELOPING MOBILE COMPUTING APPLICATIONS

Any portal system today supports user mobility. If I have an Internet mail account like hotmail or yahoo, I can access my mail from anywhere. I need a desktop or laptop com-puter to access my mailbox. I may not be able to access the same mail through some other device like a fixed phone. There are a number of factors that make mobile com-puting different from desktop computing. As a result of mobility the attributes associated with devices, network, and users are constantly changing. These changes imply that con-text and behavior of applications needs to be adapted to suit the current environment. The context and behavior adaptation is required to provide a service that is tailored to the user's present situation. There are several ways in which context and behavior can be adapted. One way is to build applications without any context or behavior awareness. Context and behavior adaptation will be handled by a behavior management middle-ware at the runtime. Other option is to build different applications specific to different context and behavior patterns. There could be systems in the organization, which was originally developed 15 years ago for some direct connected terminals like VT52. Due to change in the market expectation these systems need to be made mobile. Complexities involved in making an existing application mobile versus developing a new mobile system will be different. For a new application it is possible to embed the behavior within the application. However, for a long life system or a legacy application the content behavior adaptation will need to be done externally.