Balanced MVC Architecture for Developing
Service-based Mobile Applications
Hyun Jung La and Soo Dong Kim
Department of Computer Science
Soongsil University
511 Sangdo-Dong, Dongjak-Ku, Seoul, Korea 156-743
hjla@otlab.ssu.ac.kr sdkim777@gmail.com

Abstract— A mobile device such as Android device is
emerging as a convenient client computing device with
mobility and context-sensing capability. However, the
computing power and hardware resource of the devices are
limited due to the small form-factor. Consequently, large-
scaled applications could not be deployed on these devices. To
remedy the limitations, it is desirable to deploy some heavy-
weight functionality on the server side, and to let the client
application invoke the functionality, resulting in Service-based
Mobile Applications. In this paper, we propose a unique, ideal
and practical architecture for service-based mobile
applications, called balanced Model-View-Controller (MVC)
architecture. The architecture is devised by adopting three
architectural principles; being thin-client, being layered with
MVC, and being balanced between client side and server side.
There are a number of technical benefits by adopting this
architecture. We first present the computing model of service-
based mobile applications, and propose the balanced MVC
architecture. Then, we define methods to partition the
functionality optimally between client and provider sides, and
to design other technical decisions about the architecture. We
also present a case study of applying the proposed methods to
design the architecture.
Keywords- Mobile Application, MVC Architecture, Servie-
based
I. INTRODUCTION
Mobile devices such as iPhone and Android provide
useful software functionalities in addition to cell phone
capability. With the advent of more powerful mobile
devices, they become a convenient client computing device
not just for casual personal computing but also for enterprise
computing. The potential of utilizing mobile devices goes
beyond the conventional personal computers due to their
support for mobility and context-sensing capability.
However, mobile devices have a major drawback of
limited computing power and resources such as main
memory, secondary memory, screen size, and battery life,
mainly due to the small form-factor. Consequently, large-
scaled applications consuming large amount of resource
could not be deployed on the devices.
To overcome the limitation and to maximize utilization
of the mobile devices, service-based mobile applications
(SMAs) are emerging [1]. SMA is a mobile application
where some functionality is deployed on the server side in a
form of service, and the client application invokes the
deployed services. Services for SMA can be in either
Software-as-a-Service or Component-as-a-Service [2].
In SMA, functionality or data set are partitioned to either
client or server side, or to both sides. Hence, architecture of
SMA reveals different system characteristics and design
constraints such as functional partitioning, state consistency,
and intensive interaction with services. Therefore, we
propose a unique, ideal and practical architecture for SMAs,
called Balanced MVC Architecture. The balanced MVC
architecture is devised by adopting three architectural
principles; being thin-client, being layered with MVC, and
being balanced between a client side and a server side. In
our proposed architecture, there can be different
configurations based on different application requirements.
Different configurations yield different quality measures
such as performance, scalability, and resource consumption.
Consequently, there are a number of technical benefits and
technical challenges by adopting this architecture as given in
section 3.
Moreover, currently available object-oriented methods
do not provide effective constructs for analyzing the
requirement of SMA and designing the balanced MVC
architecture for the target application. Hence, there is a
demand for practical methods to design optimal balanced
MVC architecture for mobile application requirements.
We first define a computing model of SMA in section 3.
And, we present the balanced MVC architecture in section
4, and methods to design such architecture in section 5. We
present the result of conducting a real development project
by utilizing the proposed methods in section 6. We believe
that high quality mobile applications can be effectively
developed by utilizing our methods.
II. RELATED WORKS
We discuss current works on service-based approaches
to developing mobile applications. Tergujeff’s work
proposes service-oriented architecture (SOA) for lightweight
mobile devices through a survey of enabling technologies,
programming interfaces, and supporting devices [3]. Based
on their survey, they present a demonstration architecture
mainly based on JSR 172.
Natchetoi’s work presents a lightweight service-based
architecture for business applications running on J2ME
enabled devices [4]. They focus on devising design methods
that cover important features of mobile devices; minimizing
IEEE International Conference on E-Business Engineering
978-0-7695-4227-0/10 $26.00 © 2010 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/ICEBE.2010.70
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