A mobility-enabled architecture is usually required to facilitate the access of enterprise systems from mobile devices. Typically, mobility enabled architectures are separated in online architectures and offline architectures. The online architectures enable mobile clients to use the online model in which mobile clients access business logic and data located on backend systems using remote invocations. The offline architectures enable mobile clients to use the offline model in which mobile clients access business data locally on devices, and periodically synchronize data with backend systems. The selection of the architecture is based on the needs of the scenarios in accordance with the user requirements. For an enterprise system, there is usually more than one mobile scenario, and hence both online and offline architectures might be required. In this case, the discrepancies between the two architectures will increase the cost and decrease the interoperability between different solutions. In order to solve these problems, this paper proposes an innovative and lexible mobility enabled architecture that can be configured to be an online, an offline, or a mixed architecture in a unified framework. Using this architecture, different types (online, offline, or mixed) of mobile client applications could be built for different scenarios according to the user requirements. These applications can share the same mid-tier framework and access the same backend systems. Moreover, in this architecture, a unified access model to business logic is proposed to make it possible to adapt in time a mobile application from the online model to the offline model without architectural changes and vice versa. This paper introduces the basic requirements to build such an architecture, defines basic modules of the architecture and shows how to adapt this architecture to different (online, offline, or mixed) architectures using different configurations.

Network latency is one of the most critical factors for the usability of mobile SOA applications. This paper introduces prefetching and caching enhancements for an existing SOA framework for mobile applications to reduce the user perceived latency. Latency reduction is achieved by proactively sending data to the mobile device that could most likely be requested at a later time. This additional data is piggybacked onto responses to actual requests and injected into a client side cache, so that it can be used without an additional connection. The prefetching is done automatically using a sequence prediction algorithm. The benefit of prefetching and caching enhancements were evaluated for different network settings and a reduction of user perceived latency of up to 31% was found in a typical scenario. In contrast to other prefetching solutions, our piggybacking approach also allows to significantly increase battery lifetime of the mobile device.

A growing number of mobile users prefer to access information and even make critical business decisions using their mobile phones. We present an integrated architecture developed at SAP Research as a platform for mobile business applications. The immediate goal is to allow mobile users to access information and services provided by the business back-end servers. The long-term goal is to develop techniques to overcome many problems mobile users face under such constraints as limited bandwidth, computational power and storage resources. The framework that we propose in this paper enables business applications connected to SAP through common mobile devices. SAP users can access business data and applications on the back- end server and execute tasks without a PC. We present components of the Lightweight Architecture (LWA) with specific components in the areas of data management, data compression, connectivity, and user interfaces.

This paper provides a brief description of a research project on using Ajax to enhance mobile Web applications for enterprise use. The project, known as MobileWeaver Ajax Framework, leverages enterprise SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) and the latest web technologies on mobile devices.