SOA´s Last Mile-Connecting Smartphones to the Service Cloud

Modern Smartphones are the fastest growing computing platforms capable of consuming Web services. However, due to their form factor these mobile computing devices face many challenges and constrains when engaging service providers. How to overcome these challenges and how to link smartphones to the service cloud is one of the key issues that will have a major impact on the further growth of the software-as-a-service (SaaS) and software-plus-service (S+S) deployments. This paper focuses on the use of a cloud hosted middleware layer that acts as a personal service bus (PSB). Similar to an ESB the PSB offers a user and device customized view on services of the cloud by enabling protocol transformation, request/response augmentation, message optimization, caching and pre-fetching. The paper also reports on an evaluation of the PSB called Mobile Cloud Computing Middleware (MCCM) with the G1 (HTC).