MASA: A Cross-Platform Component Architecture for Building Mobile Applications with Service Caching

Abstract

The mobile application (i.e. mobile app or app) is becoming an important software delivery model which integrates front-end user interfaces (UIs) with back-end services in the cloud. Currently, millions of mobile apps are available, including those dealing with entertainment, news, travel, and social networking. However, apps may behave unstably since users usually use mobile apps in a variety of wireless network conditions. Meanwhile, developers are hard to mix exiting apps to create a new app and users are not able to customize an app based on their preferences. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a component architecture, called MASA (mobile application slice architecture), offering three main features: 1) providing a programming model for building cross-platform UI components, called MAS (mobile application slice), to allow the generation of mobile apps by composing multiple MAS components, 2) furnishing a proposed "Broadcast" mechanism with associated APIs to facilitate the data exchange among MAS components, and 3) supplying a relational service caching and prefetching mechanism with associated APIs to allow uninterrupted and even offline access to web services. Meanwhile, we also developed a web-based software tool, called MASA Portal, to assist users in the construction, discovery, and delivery of composite MAS. Quantitative experiment results demonstrate that the proposed MASA approach is able to achieve good scalability when combining a large number of MAS components and shorten service response times using the proposed service prefetch method.