LAOF: A New Framework to Efficiently Process Business Objects on Resource Constrained Mobile Phones

The increase in the number of mobile device users has led to an increased demand for mobile business applications. One of the main challenges in developing mobile business applications is to efficiently process business data in the resource constrained environment of mobile phones. Current approaches are seriously limited by the non-guaranteed quality of network connections or the restricted processing capabilities of mobile phones. We propose a lightweight asynchronous online framework (LAOF) that merges the benefits of both online and offline models. In our approach, business data is partially and lazily replicated to mobile phones. The mobile application executes read-only operations locally and tentatively simulates local responses to write operations before asynchronously executing on the remote server. The LAOF improves the traditional lazy replication approach by 1) efficiently compressing business data for mobile applications, 2) separating the consistency requirements for responses and business data, and 3) providing an approach that guarantees causal dependency for the asynchronous execution of write operations on the server side. In addition, we also demonstrate a sample application based on this approach and use it to evaluate the framework.