Using a cloud-hosted proxy to support mobile consumers of RESTful services

Abstract

While mobile handsets have always been heavily used for data communication most notably SMS and basic internet services like email and browsing, they are now beginning to be used increasingly often as platforms for accessing IT resources exposed as web services. However due to the resource constrains of smartphones and the often unreliable wireless connections it remains challenging to link them directly to web services. To overcome this challenge Mark Baccue proposed the idea of Mobile Cloud Computing, which is based on the concept of using cloud-hosted software components to aid advanced mobile handsets like smartphones in accessing web services. This paper focuses on use of a cloud-hosted proxy as an effective way to support mobile consumers of RESTful web services. By linking the caching components of mobile devices with a cloud-hosted proxy it becomes possible to share caches and achieve significant performance boost for mobile consumers of RESTful web services. © 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd.