Mobile event-oriented digital ecosystem

Abstract

The Digital Ecosystem (DE) paradigm is a holistic management/design/integration approach that is based on the notion of self-interested, self-managing, proactive and autonomous digital entities that evolve and self-organize. This in turn leads to the emergence of complex, self-organizing behaviours within a DE due to the evolving and highly dynamic interactions of its members. These interactions are however strongly influenced by the IT environment in which the DE is situated. Interestingly, our IT environments are currently undergoing a major transformation due to the declining importance of the desktop computing model. As smartphones and tablets begin to replace the desktop as the primary means of interacting with IT resources, our IT infrastructures are adapted to serve the increasing numbers of resource-constrained, wirelessly connected mobile devices that interact with backend components hosted in a cloud. These changes of the IT environment have also a major impact on the way Digital Ecosystems can be designed and how they operate. This paper focusses on the communication challenges of mobile digital ecosystems and presents an event-oriented form of communication that ensures high-scalability and loose coupling. Event-Oriented Middlewar; Mobile Ecolog; Cloud Computing I. MOBILE DEVICES & CLOUDSOne of the key trends shaping our IT infrastructure is the rise of mobile devices as primary means of accessing IT services and the use of cloud computing to enable scalable hosting of IT backend services. While at first these two trends seem to represent developments into opposing sides of the computing spectrum, they are a result of the ongoing commoditization of IT due to the nearly universal acceptance of open web standards. Web Services (WS) that use HTTP/HTTPS as transport-layer protocols (SOAP WS) or as application-layer protocols (REST WS), are the standard communication appraoch for interaction with the various cloud offerings (e.g. IaaS, PaaS, SaaS). The user interface on the mobile devices on the other side is increasingly influenced by HTML, CSS and JS. The rise of these standards has recently been highlighted by an ABI research report [1] that projects 2.1 billion HTML5 browsers on mobile devices by 2016.In an effort to enable consistent user experiences across different devices and platforms, developers often try and leverage as much as possible web technologies. This is done by either developing directly a mobile web app or at least blending the native app with web elements thus creating a so-called hybrid app. Hybrid apps are native apps that use an embedded browser as a means for implementing the user interface (UI) and rely on web communication protocols for backend interaction. While hybrid apps can be developed by any skilled programmer without the help of tools/libraries, the use of cross-platform tools like PhoneGap, Rhomobile, Titanium and Appcelerator are nowadays the standard approach. These crossplatform tools simplify the process of hybrid app development and allow any web developer to build...