MobCon: A Generative Middleware Framework for Java Mobile Applications

While dedicated technologies such as e.g., Sun´s J2ME MIDP offer a simple programming model for mobile applications, appropriate support for modularizing the implementation of technical concerns such as data persistence, screen management, session management, etc. is still missing. As the result, the implementation of such concerns cuts across several applications, or even several places within a single application. In this paper, we introduce the notion of a logical mobile container aimed at automating the process of nearly transparently adding technical concerns to the core functionality of a MIDP application. The container we introduce is logical: Code generation allows us to profit from high-level abstractions without adding physical layers which are too costly for a mobile application. We present an extensible mobile container framework for MIDP applications, called MobCon, which is implemented as a generative framework based on annotations.