Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Services come from the fact that Web Services use XML and related tech-
nologies connecting business applications based on various computers
and locations with various languages and platforms. The counterpart of
the WSs in the context of mobile business processes would be mobile Web
Services (MWS).
The proposed MWS are to be the base of the communications between the
Internet network and wireless devices such as mobile phones, PDAs, and so
forth. The integration between wireless device applications with other appli-
cations would be a very important step toward global enterprise systems.
Similar to WS, MWS is also based on the industry-standard language XML
and related technologies such as SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI.
Many constraints make the implementation of WSs in a mobile envi-
ronment very challenging. The challenge comes from the fact that mobile
devices have smaller power and capacities as follows:
• Small power limited to a few hours
• Small memory capacity
• Small processors not big enough to run larger applications
• Small screen size, especially in mobile phones, which requires devel-
oping specific websites with suitable size
• Small keypad that makes it harder to enter data
• Small hard disk
• The speed of the data communication between the device and the
network, and that varies
The most popular MWS is a proxy-based system where the mobile device
connects to the Internet through a proxy server. Most of the processing of
the business logic of the mobile application will be performed on the proxy
server that transfers the results to the mobile device that is mainly equipped
with a user interface to display output on its screen. The other important
advantage a proxy server provides in MWS is, instead of connecting the cli-
ent application residing on the mobile device to many service providers and
consuming most of the mobile processor and the bandwidth, the proxy will
communicate with service providers, do some processing, and send back
only the final result to the mobile device. In the realistic case where the num-
ber of mobile devices becomes in the range of tens of millions, the proxy
server would be on the cloud and the service providers would be the cloud
service providers.
Mobile Web Services use existing industry-standard XML-based Web
Services architecture to expose mobile network services to the broadest audi-
ence of developers. Developers will be able to access and integrate mobile
network services such as messaging, location-based content delivery, syn-
dication, personalization, identification, authentication, and billing services
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