miniJava: Automatic Miniaturization of Java Applications

The use of smartphones is dramatically increasing. As a consequence, many organizations have the need of migrating their Java desktop applications towards the mobile technology. In this paper we present a miniaturization approach (process and supporting tool) named miniJava for the automatic miniaturization of Java desktop applications towards Android. The Java business logic is unvaried, while the calls to the Java objects of the interface are mapped into call to objects of the target technology. Semi-automatic layout fragmentation enables us to partition a desktop Java interface in various mobile screens. The approach also migrates the application files and enables the network connection. We conduct a user study where we assess the user perception in terms of user experience and affective reaction of the miniaturized application generated by a real Java desktop application which also has real Android variant. The end-user sample consisted of 18 participants. Results of this preliminary evaluation are encouraging: they do not reveal particular problems when using the miniaturized version automatically generated of the real desktop app with respect to its original Android variant, except for the novelty, which is better perceived for the native Android one.