Design and Implementation of a MetaService for Improving Object Transfer among Applications on Android Platform

Recently, smart phones based on Android platform have been widely used, and lots of applications have been developed. Data generated from an application are frequently transferred to other applications. Therefore, a method that can easily transfer or share meta-data among applications is required. Generally meta-data created by android applications are java objects. The android platform uses clipboard, intent and content provider in order to transfer data among the applications. However, those ways are designed to transfer data as a record. So these methods have to marshall the object to a record and unmarshall the record to an object. In this paper, we designed and implemented the MetaService which can transfer any type of object made by applications. When the MetaService is used, we can reduce complex implementations such as clipboards and content providers and we can reduce many bugs. Therefore, we can make the applications simple and increase productivity.