A DYNAMIC RICH CLIENT FOR UBIQUITOUS DEVICES

摘要

Two notable developments that will greatly influence the evolution of the Web are the ubiquity of handheld and other small computing devices, and the Web services model. It is widely agreed that browsing as an interacting mechanism is not always suitable, especially for handheld and embedded devices. The proliferation of such devices and the continuous improvement in their processing capabilities motivate us to start investigating alternatives to browsers. We present a Flash MX implementation of a dynamic client that interprets the Web service user interface (UI) on-the-fly, allowing different Web services to have their tailored user interfaces. At the same time, these interfaces can be interpreted differently on different devices, taking into consideration the capabilities and limitations of the target device. The UI is specified as a tailored form of a finite state machine, coded in XML, and can be located via a Web service registry.