Migrating Android Applications towards Service-centric Architectures with Sip2Share

Mobile devices are rapidly becoming a key means to access the Internet and to discover and consume on-line services. Currently, most mobile applications are essentially clients to interact with remote services. However, the increasing power of devices is enabling a new class of applications that overcome the traditional models of desktop applications and web browsing, and embrace entirely new ways of computing. In this scenario, mobile devices are no longer intended as a means to access server-side data and functionality, but as a source of services that other devices can discover and invoke. This calls for new technologies and tools to help migrating existing mobile applications towards the emerging service-centric scenario. In this paper we illustrate Sip2Share, a middleware that supports the creation of peer-to-peer networks of services on the Android platform, and discuss how the middleware can be used to migrate existing Android applications. The paper discusses on two scenarios: a re-architecting scenario, where the application is changed to make it aware of the middleware, and a wrapping scenario, where the application remains unchanged and the connection to the middleware is created in a wrapper.