A web middleware architecture for dynamic customization of content for wireless clients

Abstract

We present a new Web middleware architecture that allows users to customize their view of the Web for optimal interaction and system operation when using non-traditional resource-limited client machines such as wireless PDAs (personal digital assistants). Web Stream Customizers (WSC) are dynamically deployable software modules and can be strategically located between client and server to achieve improvements i n performance, reliability, or security. An important design feature is that Customizers provide two points of control in the communication path between client and server, supporting adaptive system-based and content-based customization. Our architecture exploits HTTP's proxy capabilities, allowing Customizers to be seamlessly integrated with the basic Web transaction model. We describe the WSC architecture and implementation, and illustrate its use with three non-trivial, adaptive Customizer applications that we have built. We show that the overhead in our implementation is small and tolerable, and is outweighed by the benefits that Customizers provide.

Web customization using behavior-based remote executing agents

“…This framework focuses on filtering applications instead of all types of applications that could benefit from mobile code. A more flexible Web-oriented customization scheme is detailed in [14], which describes the implementation of a middleware architecture that supports adaptive Web-based proxies called Customizers. Customizers tend to be deployed on behalf of a client, and are split into two points of control, so as to separate the individual extension of a Web browser from its remote, location-dependent computation.…”

Flexible on-device service object replication with replets

“…There has also been a lot of research on optimizing dynamic and personalized Web content, including dynamic data caching [1][1] [14][27] [7] and content adaptation [5][28] [22]. However, their approaches do not support disconnected computing because they do not cache, replicate or adapt service objects at the client side.…”

“…However, traditional means of optimizing dynamic Web content generation and delivery are not well suited to the nature of unstable wireless connectivity. When a wireless client loses connection (either voluntarily or involuntarily) or roams into an area with weak connectivity, common optimization techniques, including static page prefetching [3], dynamic content caching [6] [18], and content adaptation [5][28] [22] as well as application offloading, will fail to maintain effective interactive operations (e.g., querying account information, filling survey forms, checking product inventory) as they do not eliminate the need to go through the wireless connection for dynamically generated content.…”

Using behavior templates to design remotely executing agents for wireless clients

“…Unlike our work, this framework focuses on filtering applications instead of all types of applications that could benefit from mobile code. A more flexible Web-oriented customization scheme is detailed in [19], which describes the implementation of a middleware architecture that supports adaptive Web-based proxies called Customizers. Customizers tend to be deployed on behalf of a client, and are split into two points of control, so as to separate the individual extension of a Web browser from its remote, location-dependent computation.…”