Pekka Reijula’s research while affiliated with Nokia Research Center (NRC) and other places

The use of applications that are downloaded on the fly has been somewhat restricted. Such applications can often only be run inside the browser, not in a fashion where they would be directly associated with operating system concepts. Consequently, their access to the resources of the hosting system has been limited, which forms a practical obstacle for numerous applications that could benefit from, for example, context information available in mobile setting. Furthermore, due to the design of the run-time systems, web applications are commonly run in the same process, and the protection from other programs within the same process is next to none. These limitations are not something that is a fundamental restriction of web technologies, but only related to the existing implementations. In this study, we show how we have implemented a mobile device, where scriptable applications that download data—and even complete web applications—from the web can be used in the same way as native applications are commonly used. Furthermore, instead of being static, the applications can be alive even when minimized, in a fashion that has been made popular by newer desktop systems, such as Windows 7. The experiences presented in the study are a result of a long-term research project where a new look to the design of a mobile device was taken. Over the project, four milestones can be identified in the work. These are in chronological order: (1) the design of the Lively for Qt system, (2) porting the Lively for Qt system to a desktop of a mobile device, (3) definition of a process model that protects applications from one another when needed, and (4) the introduction of declarative graphics support that liberates the developers from numerous low-level details.

Mashups that combine data from numerous web sites into an integrated experience have rapidly become state-of-the-practice way to develop new compelling applications. However, their use has been somewhat restricted, since it is common that such applications can only be run inside the browser, not in a fashion where they would be directly associated with operating system concepts. Consequently their access to the resources of the hosting system has been limited, which forms a practical obstacle for numerous applications that could benefit from e.g. context information available in mobile context. The limitations are not something that is a fundamental restriction of web technologies, but only related to the existing implementations. In this paper, we show how we have implemented a mashup desktop, where applications that download data – and even complete web applications – from the web can be used in the same way as thumbnails are commonly used. Furthermore, instead of being static, the thumbnails can be alive in a fashion that has been made popular by newer desktop systems, such as Windows 7. The implementation is based on our earlier research on composing applications using JavaScript, the Qt framework, and the K Desktop Environment, whose innovative combination has been an enabler for this work.

Software development can be eased with an integrated development environment (IDE), which allows the use of different individual tools from one single development platform. Unfortunately, when developing software for a particular embedded system, the development of an IDE for a certain device can be expensive, as the development of an IDE requires a lot of resources. In this paper, we introduce our experiences regarding the development of an integrated development for a mobile device, Nokia 770 Internet Tablet. Our goal was to aim at a fullyfledged IDE with the lowest possible costs. In order to accomplish this, we turned to open source development communities, and targeted our effort to the integration of already existing components into a simple yet practical IDE. Towards the end of the paper, we also discuss the effort it took to develop such a system.