A Description-based Approach to Mashup of Web Applications, Web Services and Mobile Phone Applications

Recent developments in mobile technology have enabled mobile phones to work as mobile Web servers. However, the composition of mobile phone applications and Web resources to form new mashup applications requires mobile programming knowledge ranging from how to create user interfaces, network connections and access to Web resources. Furthermore, the unique capabilities of mobile phone applications such as access to camera inputs or sensor data are often limited to local use only. To address these problems, we present a description-based approach and an Integration Model for the composition of mobile mashup applications combining Web applications, Web services and mobile phone applications (i.e., generic components). The compositions appear to require less native mobile programming knowledge. In the current work, to leverage access to these services and applications, an Interface Wrapper was used to transform generic components into mashup components. Composers were able to transform and reuse form-based query results from Web applications and integrate them with wrapped output from users' interaction with mobile phone applications, and other Web services. The final applications can be configured to work two ways: 1) as native mobile phone applications or 2) as a Web application accessible externally via a mobile Web server application.