Remote AppBus - Enabling Seamless Access to Short Term Memory on Mobile Devices

Richer communication, computational and content- handling capabilities on mobile devices are driving the adoption of more interactive and collaborative applications. These motivate a need for data-sharing paradigms that are flexible, efficient and lightweight - but also accessible across the different applications that may be involved in an ongoing user task. Our AppBus framework provides a unique "short term memory" facility for mobile devices, facilitating such data-sharing across co-resident applications. With the Remote AppBus extension, we make this facility accessible in a consistent manner across address spaces on a device, and potentially across devices. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of remote AppBus, and discuss its utility in enabling task collaboration on device, and in facilitating task continuity across devices. We conclude with a look at related efforts, challenges and future directions for the research.