Designing adaptive mobile applications

Standard 3-tier-architectures do not provide a sufficient basis for the development of services for mobile users. The specific characteristics of these types of applications require different approaches to application design. In view of this situation, development of specialized application architectures for the area of mobile computing will continue to be necessary. Our approach is to support the development of this kind of software systems by providing a specialized layered design for the middle tier of mobile applications as well as reusable components and services along with design and architecture patterns. This paper presents a design solution for the problem of handling multiple appliances and multiple information sources on the side of the stationary application. We illustrate our conclusions by an example from the application field of mobile document management.