Proceedings

Abstract:

We live in an occasionally connected world where the availability, speed, and latency of the network vary greatly by location. Traditional browser-based mobile applications provide remote access to data but become unresponsive or fail to work when the network or server access is unavailable. Occasionally connected computing describes a new model in which applications are made resilient to latent and intermittent network connections using a local data cache and queued user actions.

The success of the occasionally connected computing model will hinge on the ability to access a large variety of data sources and run on the most used mobile devices. Adopting web services as the foundation for data access leverages the web services ecosystem and enables occasionally connected applications to exchange data across platforms and computing environments. Targeting mass market mobile devices (digital cell phones) increases the value of the occasionally connected applications by allowing more users to access more data from more locations.

This paper motivates the need for a lightweight, standards-based web services implementation that runs on mass market mobile devices. It describes the advantages of using web services and the challenges which must be overcome to use web services on mass market devices with limited computing power and network bandwidth. The paper concludes by describing a new approach to web services which drastically reduces the code required to exchange data with remote services, enabling the creation of more compelling applications with sophisticated user interfaces and application logic.