An Integrated Lightweight Software Architecture for Mobile Business Applications

Abstract

A growing number of mobile users prefer to access information and even make critical business decisions using their mobile phones. We present an integrated architecture developed at SAP Research as a platform for mobile business applications. The immediate goal is to allow mobile users to access information and services provided by the business back-end servers. The long-term goal is to develop techniques to overcome many problems mobile users face under such constraints as limited bandwidth, computational power and storage resources. The framework that we propose in this paper enables business applications connected to SAP through common mobile devices. SAP users can access business data and applications on the back- end server and execute tasks without a PC. We present components of the Lightweight Architecture (LWA) with specific components in the areas of data management, data compression, connectivity, and user interfaces.