A Cross-Platform Runtime Environment for Mobile Widget-Based Application

In recent years, the market of mobile device keeps growing dramatically. Apple iPhone and Google Android are the two representatives of this kind of devices. However, the mobile applications of these platforms can only be executed on some specific platforms; these applications are not portable to other platforms. Another kind of application is Web-based widget, such as Yahoo! Mobile Widget. This kind of application can be executed on different mobile platforms if there are local runtime environments installed on them. However, Yahoo has to provide a different runtime environment for each different mobile platform; if there is any platform which is not supported by Yahoo, Yahoo! Mobile Widget cannot be executed. Most of the Web applications can be executed on mobile devices because more and more Web-related standards are supported by mobile Web browsers. However, the drawback of Web application is that it cannot be executed without Internet connection. In this paper, we propose a Web-based widget execution runtime environment and adopt the Google Gears technology for offline execution. In this way, mobile users can enjoy Web applications via their mobile Web browsers even if their phones are under offline mode.