Efficient Retargeting of Generated Device User-Interfaces

Many pervasive computing systems have been built for using mobile computers to interact with networked devices. To deploy a device's user-interface, several systems dynamically generate the user-interface on a mobile computer. While this approach has several advantages, empirical results from different generators show that it takes a relatively long time for a mobile computer to create a user-interface from scratch. This paper shows that it is possible to overcome this limitation by efficiently mapping or retargeting a previously generated user-interface of one (source) device to another (target) device of the same or different type. Using the implementation of an existing generator and a set of real-world scenarios, we show that user-interface retargeting can yield deployment times that are often as good as or noticeably better than the approach of locally loading pre-existing manually-written user-interface code.