Smartcomposition: A component-based approach for creating multi-screen mashups

Abstract

The spread and usage of mobile devices, such as smartphones or tablets, increases continuously. While most of the applications developed for these devices can only be used on the device itself, mobile devices also offer a way to create a new kind of applications: multi-screen applications. These applications run distributedly on multiple screens, like a PC, tablet, smartphone or TV. The composition of all these screens creates a new user experience for single as well as for several users. While creating mashups is a common way for designing end user interfaces, they fail in supporting multiple screens. This paper presents a component-based approach for developing multi-screen mashups, named SmartComposition. The SmartComposition approach extends the OMELETTE reference architecture to deal with multiple screens. Furthermore, we enhance the OMDL for describing multi-screen mashups platform independently. We draw up several scenarios that illustrate the opportunities of multi-screen mashups. From these scenarios we derive requirements SmartComposition needs to comply with. A huge challenge we face is the synchronization between the screens. SmartComposition solves this through realtime communication via WebSockets or Peer-to-Peer communication. We present a first prototype and evaluate our approach by developing two different multi-screen mashups. Finally, next research steps are discussed and challenges for further research are defined.