Extensible architecture for context-aware mobile web applications

Abstract

Over the years web browsers have gone from being used only on personal computers to a wide range of devices such as music players, video game consoles and mobile phones. Today people commonly use native applications and web applications on their mobile phones. There are many technical differences between native applications and web applications. One of these differences is that native applications can use the device hardware components that capture and manage context information, such as GPS, sensors, camera, etc. The differences between mobile phones require that in most cases it is necessary to develop a native application for each specific platform (iOS, Android, WebOS, Windows Phone, Symbian, etc), which is really expensive, so many developers and companies choose to develop web applications that can be used on any device with a web browser. The use of context information has proved very useful in many native applications, but web applications cannot use this type of information. This paper describes a proposal that allows web applications to access context information in a simple and fast. The proposed system consists of a modular web browser context aware and a set of specific XML tags that can be used on web applications.