Run-time UI adaptation in the context of the Device-Independent Architecture

The increasing diversity of end-devices used by users to access their applications and systems strengthens the need for device-independent methods for implementing these applications. The Device-Independent Architecture (DIA) is one of the available approaches to this problem, but it does not directly address the issue of user interface (UI) device-independency. This issue can be addressed by real-time UI adaptation, but it is not clear whether the DIA architecture requires new UI adaptation methods or may use existing ones. This paper presents results of our analysis of this issue. Through theoretical model-based analysis of UI adaptation in various application architectures and through case studies of practical UI adaptation solutions we came up with a conclusion that the DIA-based systems may use existing real-time UI adaptation methods. Although, they have to be used with a different set of optimization criteria.