A Data Mashup Engine for Smartphones Based on XProc

Abstract

One of smartphones' core factor of success is the vast amount of available mobile applications. Despite this numerous number of apps there cannot exist one for every single use case. If a user does not find an app fulfilling the requirements, he rarely is able to write one of its own because of (1) missing programming skills, (2) too much time effort for simple tasks and (3) expenses on particular systems. This work proposes a mobile workflow engine on Android to empower users without much technical knowledge to build their solution in a platform-neutral and standardized language called XProc which is the W3C recommendation for data processing via XML technologies. For this purpose one of the XProc implementations is ported to Android and extended with smartphone specific features and services such as location, short messages, mobile UI, etc. Also a trigger mechanism has been implemented to activate workflows based on the user's context like time, location and reception of a short messages. A performance measurement done in this work demonstrates no execution drawback compared to native development after a workflow is compiled to its object representation.