Next Generation Wireless Applications: Creating Mobile Applications in a Web 2.0 and Mobile 2.0 World, 2nd Edition

10.8 MOVING TOWARDS A COMMERCIAL MOBILE PLATFORM

Thus far, we have been building our view of what a mobile device consists of. We have started out with a simplified layered model that captures the essence of what a mobile device does. Our first level of refinement was to propose an infrastructure for the layers, namely an operating system and a means of engaging with peripherals and the networking layer via defined software entities called APIs.

What we would like to do now is to further refine our architecture by the inclusion of certain utility applications that we might find useful on a mobile device and that are a sufficiently common requirement that we might expect to see them on most devices. Our further refined architecture is shown in Figure 10.17.

The figure shows that more detail has been added to the services layer. Essentially, we have added programs that will run in the services layer, some of which are useful utilities in their own right, accessible to the end-user, and some of which provide an additional framework for supporting and deploying our own service applications on the device. In this section, we shall examine what these applications and utilities are. We shall move towards demonstrating how this model is reflected in most commercial solutions available, and for various form factors of device. This will give us confidence that we have established a viable model and it will enable us to better grasp the various mobile platform solutions being offered.

The ...