Designing an XML-based context-aware transformation framework for mobile execution environments using CC/PP and XSLT

Mobile and embedded devices provide the function of surfing the Internet anytime and anywhere. There are several kinds of mobile execution environments (MExE) built on these appliances, such as WAP, J2ME, PJava, and Microsoft CLI. It is difficult for programmers to write a program only once and then execute it on these mobile devices. The primary reason is there are a variety of devices with different runtime environments and diverse hardware/software capabilities. Therefore, in order to accomplish the following: (1) applications can be designed regardless of what kind of the target mobile device belongs to; (2) the program of an application can be automatically adapted to the target MExE environments. We propose an XML-based Context-Aware transformation Framework (X-CAF). In this framework, we design an XML-based programming model to divide programmers into two roles, user interface (UI) designer and logic programmer, so as to efficiently develop an application in separation-of-concern way. Besides, we exploit the XSLT/XPath transformation mechanism to transform documents of XML User-interface Language (XUL) and LoGic Markup Language (LGML) into others of the target MExE languages by means of the context information, device capabilities and user preferences. Moreover, to generate codes of the applications flexibly and efficiently, we divide the code processing of an application into that of the user interface occurring at runtime and that of the event-handling logic occurring at static time. In brief, our paper contributes an XML-based application development environment and transformation framework to the access to device independence. D 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.