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DHPC Technical Report DHPC-124

Distributed Java Support for Mobile Applications on Lightweight Devices

K.A.Hawick and H.A.James

Archived 20 September 2002.

Abstract

Mobile computers and personal digital assistants are now widely affordable and are powerful enough to run paradigm shifting mobile applications and support programming environments like Java. We are investigating the support services and software infrastructure that is needed for the next generation of mobile users and applications that will use such devices. Java is a particularly attractive development environment for smart mobile applications allowing for a considerably richer higher level set of development libraries and components than would be possible using traditional embedded systems languages. Our goal is to investigate the issues surrounding a interoperating mobile software support structure that can be scaled to cope with large numbers of participating nodes - both humans represented by their PDA proxies and robots represented by agent based control systems. In this paper we discuss the Java support environments we have experimented with; the performance of the base components and our observed trends for mobile Java; and our architecture for a mobile support environment using Java: network; thread; introspection and communications packages. We also discuss our use of WaveLAN and Bluetooth communications systems from Java and also the use of location context information to enrich potential mobile applications behaviour.

Keywords: Java; mobile application; PDA; distributed applications; middleware.

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