Web Service Clients on Mobile Android Devices: A Study on Architectural Alternatives and Client Performance

This paper studies Android, a new open source software stack initiated by Google, and the possibilities of developing a mobile client for MPower, a service oriented architecture platform based upon SOAP messaging. The study focuses on the architectural alternatives, their impacts on the mobile client application, Android’s performance on SOAP messaging, and how Web services’ design can be optimized to give well performing Android clients. The results from this study shows how different architectures directly impacts properties, like off-line usage support, of a SOAP client application on Android. Additionally, the performance measurements shows that building Android client applications which directly invokes Web services with SOAP messaging is possible to make effective enough for typical usage situations. Further, the results indicates how Web services should be designed with care to minimize the required data transfer and processing on the device. Such careful design can be achieved by using coordinating Web services which hides complexity and provides an interface designed for the specific client applications