mPlaton: Browsing and development platform of mobile applications

VTT Information Technology has created a comprehensive mobile Internet research and development environment, the components of which enable experimentation of new multimedia technologies and ideas, and their implementations in the mobile user's Internet environment before the method is standardized and incorporated into commercial products. This reports describes the mPlaton browsing and development platform of mobile applications, which forms a part of the VTT's mobile Internet research environment. mPlaton supports the development of client-side mobile browsing applications, so that implemented parts are consistent, generic and reusable. It provides frameworks and solutions how to browse the content in mobile environment, present the content with profile information in separate user agent implementations with multimodal controls available and create and edit the browsing content. The core of mPlaton include frameworks for browsing (AGB), for mobile user agents, content types and multimodal controls (MIMEFrame), and for XML editors (FEdXML). The frameworks are designed for mobile environments so that they are very light and scalable, based on generic standards, and are transferable for separate platforms and can be implemented by using different kinds of object-oriented languages (e.g., Java and C++). The solutions introduced in this work are implemented in Java SE, Java Personal Profile and Java MIDP platforms. The solutions are based strongly on standards (e.g., by World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and Open Mobile Alliance (OMA)) and generic object-oriented technologies, and they are designed to be generic enough to enable the transferability to other platforms.