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m.Site: Efficient Content Adaptation for Mobile Devices

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 7662))

Abstract

Building a mobile user interface can be a time consuming process for web site administrators. We present a novel approach for adapting existing websites to the mobile paradigm. In contrast to existing technologies, our approach aims to provide a trio of functionality, ease of use, and scalability for large web communities. A site administrator visually selects objects within a web page, and assigns one or more attributes to page objects from a rich collection of pre-defined page modifications. Our proposed system then generates code for a multi-session, php-based proxy server to provide dynamic mobile content adaptations based on the attributes selected. The modifications encapsulate complex page interactions and provide a simplified interface to mobile users. The proxy server is augmented with a highly efficient and standards-compliant browser residing on the server to interpose on behalf of a resource-constrained mobile client. Adaptations such as pre-rendering of content can be cached and shared across users to amortize load. We build a prototype and evaluate its efficacy on a complex web application driving a busy online community with nearly 66,000 members.

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© 2012 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing

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Koehl, A., Wang, H. (2012). m.Site: Efficient Content Adaptation for Mobile Devices. In: Narasimhan, P., Triantafillou, P. (eds) Middleware 2012. Middleware 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7662. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35170-9_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35170-9_3

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-35169-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-35170-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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