Abstract

Within the last years mobile devices have evolved into powerful computers capable of running fairly sophisticated applications. Since almost every bigger software application relies on an underlying component technology—such as OSGi—it is obvious to develop mobile applications based on components, too. In 2008 Google entered the mobile device market with an open-source operating system called Android introducing a new component system. In contrast, OSGi is a technically mature component technology with a wide-spread area of application, but Android by default doesn’t support it.

Within this paper I will compare and discuss both component systems and will provide a way to get OSGi working on Android. Furthermore I want to introduce ROCS (Remote OSGi Caching Service), a remotely provisioned OSGi framework for ambient systems. ROCS enables mobile devices to become cloud-aware by running applications directly from network without storing them locally.

Keywords

Android, Mobile Devices, Mobile Programming, Compo nent Technologies, OSGi, Cloud Computing, Java, Java Class Loading, RMI