Mobile Web applications (a.k.a., Web apps) stand for an important trend for next-generation Internet-based software. Currently popular mobile Web apps need to be adapted to various and ever-changing contexts and personalized user requirements. Based on our over-decade research experiences and practice on the Internetware paradigm, this position article describes an Internetware-oriented approach to designing, developing, and deploying situational mobile Web apps, by synthesizing the resources and services of mobile and cloud. Guided by a novel Service-Model-View-Controller (SMVC) software model, a mobile Web app is organized into a well-defined structure that facilitates adaptation including online/offline data access, computation offloading, user interface optimization, hybrid composition, etc. We provide efficient runtime support spanning mobile and cloud to make mobile Web apps more flexibly adaptive. The proof-of-concept evaluation demonstrates that our approach can benefit end-users with optimized user experience of mobile Web apps.

To meet the needs of computing in the Internet environment, the Internetware software paradigm provides a set of technologies that support the development of applications with characteristics that are autonomous, cooperative, situational, evolvable, emergent, and trustworthy.

In enterprise organizations, the Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) requirement has become prevalent as employees use their own mobile devices to process the workflow-oriented tasks. Consequently, it calls for approaches that can quickly develop and integrate mobile user interactions into existing business processes, and adapt to various contexts. However, designing, developing, and deploying adaptive and mobile-oriented user interfaces for existing process engines are non-trivial, and require significant systematic efforts. To address this issue, we present a novel middleware-based approach, called MUIT, to developing and deploying the Mobility, User Interactions and Tasks into WS-BPEL engines. MUIT provides a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) that provides some intuitive facilities to support the declarative development of adaptive, mobile-oriented, and Web-based user interfaces in WS-BPEL. The DSL can significantly reduce developers' manual efforts of developing user interactions by preventing arbitrarily mixed code, and its runtime supports satisfactory user experiences. Additionally, MUIT can be seamlessly integrated into WS-BPEL without intrusions of existing process instances. We implement a proof-of-concept prototype by integrating MUIT into the commodity WS-BPEL-based Apusic Platform, and evaluate the performance and usability of MUIT platform.

The convergence of Services Computing and Web 2.0 gains a large space of opportunities to compose “situational” web applications from web-delivered services. However, the large number of services and the complexity of composition constraints make manual composition difficult to application developers, who might be non-professional programmers or even end-users. This paper presents a systematic data-driven approach to assisting situational application development. We first propose a technique to extract useful information from multiple sources to abstract service capabilities with a set tags. This supports intuitive expression of user's desired composition goals by simple queries, without having to know underlying technical details. A planning technique then exploits composition solutions which can constitute the desired goals, even with some potential new interesting composition opportunities. A browser-based tool facilitates visual and iterative refinement of composition solutions, to finally come up with the satisfying outputs. A series of experiments demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our approach.