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Two parallel emerging trends are currently taking place
in the software industry. First, software applications
are moving to the World Wide Web: as part of the Web 2.0
transition, web pages are becoming increasingly interactive
and will allow the use of desktop-style applications
on the Web. Second, mobile devices are becoming an
important platform for web applications: the devices
are equipped with ever faster processors and network
connections, allowing web applications to run on
mobile devices as well. Although various usability
differences will likely remain, we believe that in
the long run there will be a uniform web application
platform ("One Web") that can be used with different
types of terminals, including desktop computers
and mobile devices.
In this paper, we summarize our experiences in porting the
Sun(TM) Labs Lively Kernel - an exceptionally 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.
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