A new technology driven approach for extended mobile applications: MAML - Mobile Application Markup Language

摘要

The Mobile Application Markup Language (MAML), which is specialized for the requirements of mobile information systems, defines markup for XML browsers on smart phones. It does not only integrate location acquisition, based on GPS or GSM-cell based tracking into mobile applications, but also supports all hardware features of current and prospected smart phones. Beside SMS, Picture-SMS, EMS, or MMS as messaging services for data exchange, MAML offers support for smart phones equipped with hardware capabilities for communication over short-range such as WLAN, Bluetooth or IR transceivers, and makes these peer-to-peer communication mechanisms available for application developers, who are building server-side hosted mobile applications. Moreover, MAML makes smart phones' sensors, like microphones or even built-in cameras, easily accessible to an application developer, and it is also prepared for the integration of mobile payment solutions. The main difference between MAML and a XML document, providing just pure data for presenting information on a mobile's display, is that MAML contains active content. This content is provided in a device independent way and can be transformed into WML, XHTML, cHTML, or other representations, suitable for rendering on existing micro browsers of smart phones, but with possibly losing some extended functionality. With a MAML-aware micro browser, which natively understands MAML, all functionality for extended mobile applications for the next generation extended mobile applications is made available to developers and programmers with all the benefits of a markup language.