Creating a mobile web application platform: the lively kernel experiences

The software industry is currently in the middle of two transitions -- towards web-based software and towards web-enabled mobile devices. In this paper, we summarize our experiences in porting the Sun Labs Lively Kernel - an interactive web programming environment developed at Sun Microsystems Laboratories - onto a Nokia N810 mobile device. We report our experiences based on two different approaches that were used. First, we ported the system onto a regular web browser running in the mobile device. Second, we developed a custom-built native execution environment that provides more direct and extensive access to the underlying resources of the system. Based on these experiments, we will discuss the lessons learned as well as provide directions and guidance for future work.