| Mobile devices have become an integral part of everyone's daily life. The ability to install new applications has allowed users to fully customize their devices to their needs and preferences. However, there is the problem of developing a different client program for different devices due to the software and hardware differences of each device. Not only would this incur higher software development costs, but it is also inconvenient for the user to find the appropriate version for their device. The use of Web services may solve this problem as they are platform-independent, but the exchanging of XML messages involved with Web services uses large amounts of data and requires a powerful processor. Mobile devices are currently not suitable for processing such data and the exchange of such large amounts of data over the cellular network may incur heavy data charges.;To solve this problem, we will introduce a framework for mobile devices to find and access Web services through their mobile browser. A registry allows users to search for services while a gateway is used to invoke the Web services and process the XML requests and responses. Therefore, the amount of processing is kept to a minimum on the mobile device. A proof of concept prototype implementation with the ability to register, search, and access Web services was constructed and tested to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. The results from these tests clearly demonstrate the benefits of using a gateway as an intermediary between the Web service and the mobile device as well as the effectiveness of the overall framework. |
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