Context aware services for mobile users: JQMobile vs Flash Builder implementations

Current information systems that help user mobility, i.e., mobility information systems, generally lack of the basic context information that support people activity in time-changing environments: they do not take into account current traffic, weather or car pollution conditions, nor the mobile users are timely informed about accidents, or road works. Also, such systems do not consider the user personal information that influences the user context awareness such as age, or health status. Aim of the paper is to illustrate how context aware services may be offered by an implementation architecture based on a server following the Model-View-Controller paradigm, i.e., Ruby on Rails (RoR), whose controllers implement the use stories of the mobile users, and whose views are JQMobile scripts that provide for each story the most suitable scenario by an user interface based on the familiar Google Maps. How Flash Builder applications resident on the user mobiles may provide the users with similar RoR views, but saving RoR time, is also widely discussed. Furthermore the paper claims that involving actively the mobiles into the mobility information system may support more effectively the context aware decisions of the mobile users.