Application hosting for pervasive computing

This paper reviews the impact that the emerging pervasive “sea of devices” may have on the task of service provisioning and introduces Whale, an architecture that enables an application not only to vary the format of the content generated for each particular device, but also allows the author to define a device-specific view on the application's data and features, thus providing optimal application interaction for each device. Whale achieves this through the strict separation of content presentation from content generation, using JavaServer Pages™ and JavaBeans™ technologies, and by creating WhaleInvoker as an enhancement of WebSphere™, which dynamically selects and executes the appropriate combination of JavaServer Pages and JavaBeans to satisfy a data request from an end-user device. The paper also describes the first commercial deployment of the Whale architecture—Swissair's Easy Check-In service.