Mobile applications

FEATURE: MOBILE APPLICATIONS

Development Platforms for Mobile Applications:
Status and Trends
Damianos Gavalas and Daphne Economou, University of the Aegean

lier research,1 technical specifications, white papers, and an informal survey of 32 mobile-application developers with hands-on experience using the platforms we reviewed. Most importantly, we developed a simple game application andimplemented it on all four platforms as a case study for highlighting the main characteristics and relative merits and shortcomings of the four platforms. We describe the general results of this comparison as well as details from the game application’s development. We summarize the results from all sources in a table and conclude with our assessment of how appropriate the different platforms arewith respect to critical application-development requirements.

// A comparison of four popular runtime environments
clari es the options available for developing applications that run on resource-constrained mobile devices. //

Four MobileApplication Platforms
Numerous development platforms are available for handheld devices, including native environments such as the Symbian, OpenC, iPhone,and Palm operating systems; Web runtimes such as widgets; and runtime environments such as Python, Lazarus, Brew, and the four we review here—Java Mobile Edition (ME), .NET Compact Framework (CF), Flash Lite, and Android—which currently enjoy the largest developer and deployment bases. Figure 1 summarizes the software stacks for these four platforms.

MOBILE DEVICES HAVE STEADILY gainedacceptance as a multimedia platform. Current tools offer application developers options to use various technologies—for example, Java, Open C, Python, Flash Lite, XHTML/CSS, JavaScript, and Mobile Ajax—to implement highly functional mobile applications. Content developers can work with audio, video, multimedia messaging, and Flash to create rich and compelling mobile content.
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Although the choice of development platform is largely market-driven, it also depends on the characteristics of available platforms and the requirements of particular applications. To illuminate the status and trends in current development platforms, we reviewed and compared four popular mobile-application runtime environments with respect to various quantitative andqualitative criteria. We based the comparisons on data from ear-

Java ME
This subset of the Java platform provides a certified collection of Java APIs for developing software for resourceconstrained devices such as cell phones, PDAs, and set-top boxes (http://java. sun.com/javame).
Features. Java ME runs on top of a kernel-based virtual machine (KVM), which allows reasonable, but not

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FEATURE: MOBILE APPLICATIONS

complete, access to the underlying device’s functionality. Java ME supports cross-platform development through configurations and profi les: • A con guration defi nes the minimum Java VM features and library set for a horizontal family of devices—that is, devices with similar processing and memorylimitations, user interface requirements, and connection capabilities. • A pro le comprises libraries specialized in the unique characteristics of a particular device class. All Java ME-enabled mobile devices currently support the following configuration and profi le specifications: • Connected Limited Device Con guration (CLDC), a framework for Java ME applications targeting resource-constraineddevices. CLDC contains a strict subset of the Java class libraries needed for mobile-

application development. • Mobile Information Device Pro le (MIDP), a specification for using Java on embedded devices such as mobile phones and PDAs. MIDP is part of the Java ME platform and sits on top of CLDC. Java applications developed over CLDC/MIDP are referred to as MIDlets and are typically packaged...