ActiveForms: A Runtime for Mobile Application Forms

ActiveForms is a mobile centric runtime environment which provides users with a rich and unified experience for interacting over different communication channels. It provides mobile forms based user interface for interacting with the underlying mobile applications and services. ActiveForms provides a common runtime environment which helps to compose underlying applications and services along with different communication channels, such as HTTP, MMS, SMS or Bluetooth, into a manageable process oriented application. ActiveForms is a research prototype developed for smart phone environments. It utilizes standards based technologies for user interface such as XHTML and mobile Forms and for business logic it is based on Web services business process execution language (WS-BPEL). In this paper we will emphasize the layered architecture of ActiveForms, discuss the separation of user interface from integration logic that composes the underlying applications and services into a process oriented system. We will also discuss our experiences and learning.