Mechanism for dynamic deployment of plastic mobile cross-platform user interfaces

摘要

New platforms and mobile devices are constantly coming to the market but, in an effort to attract more public, several manufacturers incorporate special features into their models, resulting in a lack of uniformity among them. Thus, devices present different processing, memory, storage, communication and displaying capabilities. This heterogeneity causes that the application development process becomes not homogeneous for all these devices, increasing not only costs but also the possibility of creating inconsistent versions of each application (one for each device). To cope with this problem, we propose to incorporate into the application development process for mobile devices a mechanism to dynamically adapt the Graphical User Interface (GUI) of such applications to changes in the context of use, which is defined in terms of the user, the environment and the platform. Using plasticity as a GUI adaptability technique, we develop a mobile cross-platform mechanism to solve this problem.