Application System Architecture for Cellular Phones by Dividing Interaction Logics

This paper describes application system architecture using cellular phones as user interface devices, which enables users to interact with the system by graphic symbols on a client screen. Our approach has the following features: (i) divided interaction logics running on a server and a Java phone client; both interaction logics cooperate to accomplish a user's operation using a simplified script, (ii) local interaction which enables users to handle figures on a client screen without connecting to a server, and (iii) device-independent script which hides the differences of API sets among various cellular phones. By using this architecture, complicated figures including lots of graphic symbols can be displayed in spite of program-size limitation on a client device, and application programs including same interaction logics are just described once for various cellular phones. Our experiments show the advantage of the local interaction. A client program can respond immediately when handling complicated figures. The ratio of requests to the server is reduced to 23%. It takes less than 9 seconds to display typical contents, which is good enough for practical use. This method also reduces development costs at the second development or later.