Improving device-aware Web services and their mobile clients through an aspect-oriented, model-driven approach

Context: Mobile devices have become an essential element in our daily lives, even for connecting to the Internet. Consequently, Web services have become extremely important when offering services through the Internet. However, current Web services are very inflexible as regards their invocation from different types of device, especially if we consider the need for them to be adaptable when being invoked from mobile devices. Objective: In this paper, we provide an approach for the creation of flexible Web services which can be invoked transparently from different device types and which return subsequent responses, as well as providing the client's adaptation as a result of the particular device characteristics and end-user preferences in a completely decoupled way. Method: Aspect-Oriented Programming and model-driven development have been used to reduce both the impact of service and client code adaptation for multiple devices as well as to facilitate the developer's task. Results: A model-driven methodology can be followed from system models to code, providing the Web service developer with the option of marking which services should be adapted to mobile devices in the UML models, and obtaining the decoupled adaptation code automatically from the models. Conclusion: We can conclude that the approach presented in this paper provides us with the possibility of following the development of mobile-aware Web services in an integrated platform, benefiting from the use of aspect-oriented techniques not only for maintaining device-related code completely decoupled from the main functionality one, but also allowing a modularized non-intrusive adaptation of mobile clients to the specific device characteristics as well as to final user preferences.