Abstract:
Mobile devices, such as smart phones, are now popular commodity devices that are being used to run increasingly sophisticated software. These trends have been made possible by advances in hardware, software and communications technology. It is now possible for mobile devices themselves to host services that can be consumed over the Internet by clients. Existing research has led to a number of middleware systems that facilitate the development and operation of such mobile services. One middleware platform known as Odin, developed at the University of Auckland, exposes mobile services using Java RMI interfaces. The problem with this is that clients must be implemented using the Java programming language. In this thesis we describe MFAOW (Multi Feature Adaptive Odin Wrapper) -- an extension to Odin that: i) Automatically generates a language-neutral Web service interface for a given Odin mobile service, and ii) Employs an extensible wrapper architecture enabling the development and use of value-added plug-ins. Two plug-ins that we have developed address security and performance concerns. The security plug-in handles authentication and message confidentiality, while the performance plug-in provides a basic caching mechanism. Plug-ins are application independent and therefore reusable, and enhance the operation of the existing Odin middleware. We describe the design of MFAOW and present a proof-of-concept prototype, along with valuation of the prototype.