Abstract
Developing Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) for mobile applications is a difficult task. Modern applications frequently need to interact with humans that use several devices with different characteristics (such as screen size or operating system). Any application that creates a specific GUI (surely designed for a certain device family) is likely to be rendered and/or behave incorrectly on many other user devices. Moreover, user interactions also need to be adapted to the preferences of each specific user and be learned from user context. The above challenges delegate every single application to have multiple versions of its GUI to be correctly executed on every possible device and operating system combination, in addition to consider user preferences and context.
In this paper, we propose an architecture based on mobile agents for developing adaptive user interfaces for multiple devices and applications. This architecture makes it possible to further separate GUIs from their underlying logic, allowing GUIs to be specified once and automatically be adapted to different platforms and user preferences without further development. Moreover, our architecture enables GUIs to be composed in a collaborative way by multiple agents and across different devices by automatically adapting them to each device capabilities and user preferences. Thus every application developer is relieved of considering these issues.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
Definitive data and analysis for the mobile industry, https://www.gsmaintelligence.com/, last accessed 12th September 2016.
- 2.
ADUS stands for ADaptive User interface for mobile deviceS.
- 3.
Note that XAML is thus not used only for mobile devices, but for a broad family of heterogeneous devices (e.g., desktop computers, surfaces, consoles, ...).
- 4.
We refer the interested reader to our previous work [20], where a discussion about the benefits and drawbacks of other possible alternative agent architectures are presented.
References
Rogers, R., Lombardo, J., Blake, M.: Android Application Development. O’Reilly, Sebastopol (2009)
Xamarin: http://www.xamarin.com. Accessed 12 Sept 2016
Bullard, V., Smith, K.T., Daconta, M.C.: Essential XUL Programming. Wiley, Hoboken (2001)
Abrams, M., Phanouriou, C., Batongbacal, A.L., Williams, S.M., Shuster, J.E.: UIML: an appliance-independent XML user interface language. Comput. Netw. 31(11), 1695–1708 (1999)
Michotte, B., Vanderdonckt, J.: GrafiXML, a multi-target user interface builder based on UsiXML. In: Proceedings of 4th International Conference on Autonomic and Autonomous Systems (ICAS 2008), pp. 15–22. IEEE Computer Society, March 2008
Coninx, K., Luyten, K., Vandervelpen, C., Van den Bergh, J., Creemers, B.: Dygimes: dynamically generating interfaces for mobile computing devices and embedded systems. In: Chittaro, L. (ed.) Mobile HCI 2003. LNCS, vol. 2795, pp. 256–270. Springer, Heidelberg (2003). doi:10.1007/978-3-540-45233-1_19
Gray, R.S., Kotz, D., Nog, S., Rus, D., Cybenko, G.: Mobile agents for mobile computing. Technical report TR96-285, Dartmouth College (1996)
Neuburg, M.: Progamming iOS 9. O’Reilly, Sebastopol (2015)
Weyl, E.: Mobile HTML5. O’Reilly, Sebastopol (2013)
Rischpater, R.: Application Development with Qt Creator, 2nd edn. Packt Publishing, Birmingham (2014)
Bobed, C., Ilarri, S., Mena, E.: Distributed mobile computing: development of distributed applications using mobile agents. In: Proceeding of the 16th International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing (PDPTA 2010), CSREA Press, pp. 562–568, July 2010
Leppänen, T., Liu, M., Harjula, E., Ramalingam, A., Ylioja, J., Närhi, P., Riekki, J., Ojala, T.: Mobile agents for integration of internet of things and wireless sensor networks. In: Proceedings of 2013 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC 2013), pp. 14–21. IEEE Computer Society, October 2013
Liu, H., Lieberman, H., Selker, T.: A model of textual affect sensing using real-world knowledge. In: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI 2003), pp. 125–132. ACM, January 2003
Su, C.J., Chu, T.W.: A mobile multi-agent information system for ubiquitous fetal monitoring. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 11(1), 600–625 (2014)
Vassileva, J., Mccalla, G., Greer, J.: Multi-agent multi-user modeling in I-Help. J. User Model. User-Adap. Interact. 13(1–2), 179–210 (2003)
Mitrović, N., Mena, E.: Adaptive user interface for mobile devices. In: Forbrig, P., Limbourg, Q., Vanderdonckt, J., Urban, B. (eds.) DSV-IS 2002. LNCS, vol. 2545, pp. 29–43. Springer, Heidelberg (2002). doi:10.1007/3-540-36235-5_3
Nathan, A.: Building Windows 10 Applications with XAML and C# Unleashed, 2nd edn. Sams, Carmel (2016)
Mitrovic, N., Bobed, C., Mena, E.: A review of user interface description languages for mobile applications. In: Proceedings of 10th International Conference on Mobile Ubiquitous Computing, Systems, Services and Technologies (UBICOMM 2016), ARIA XPS, October 2016
Morris, J.: Android User Interface Development. Packt Publishing, Birmingham (2011)
Mitrovic, N., Royo, J., Mena, E.: Adus: indirect generation of user interfaces on wireless devices. In: Proceedings of 7th International Workshop Mobility in Databases and Distributed Systems (MDDS 2004), Within 15th International Workshop on Database and Expert Systems Applications (DEXA 2004), Springer 1–5, September 2004
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the CICYT project TIN2013-46238-C4-4-R and DGA-FSE.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Mitrović, N., Bobed, C., Mena, E. (2017). Dynamic User Interface Architecture for Mobile Applications Based on Mobile Agents. In: Ciuciu, I., et al. On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems: OTM 2016 Workshops. OTM 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10034. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55961-2_29
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55961-2_29
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-55960-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-55961-2
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)