SkeenZone: A distributed Android chat application and extensible middleware

Mobile computing devices are becoming ubiquitous parts of everyday life. This growth opens a development space for practical applications geared towards decentralized collaboration and coordination. The mobile development platform Android provides rich APIs for interacting with and harnessing devices’ hardware components, but does not provide developers with adequate support for distributed computing. We present SkeenZone, a lightweight and extensible Java middleware framework created to enable the development of distributed mobile applications, and ChatHoc, a simple distributed Android chat application for evaluating and demonstrating our middleware’s ease of use. We describe two limitations of the Android platform that impose heavy restrictions on developers’ ability to build and test applications involving ad hoc networks.