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Mobile devices are gaining in popularity every year as more devices are released that appeal to all of the different types of people and their lifestyles. In parallel the technology involved evolves and reduces in size making devices smaller and more powerful. Mobile devices, such as Personal Data Assistants (PDAs) and smart phones can be used in more areas than just the business world. Classrooms can utilize these devices for interactive in class assignments, quizzes, help, presentations, and even demos. Many development studios exist to create rich and beautiful applications or games for mobile devices, such as a Blackberry, but they all require extensive knowledge in programming languages (i.e. Java). To further utilize the available power and vast quantity of mobile devices we discuss and propose developing a framework for dynamic content generation. The content development framework proposed will be able to facilitate the development and generation of mobile applications for various Java based platforms. Being able to choose from different supported resolutions increases the usefulness and practical abilities of a solution such as this. The development framework consists of several predefined templates to aid during the development process as well as blank forms for more customizability. A proof of concept framework and development environment was developed to prove and demonstrates the capabilities and potential for this framework.

Mobile application development is a field that has gone through rapid change during the past two decades. Where once the development and control of mobile devices was in the hands of the phone manufacturer and the network carrier and development was done 'in house', the evolution of mobile device capabilities has expanded the potential for mobile application developers. This evolution has created four main actors in the world of mobile applications, the network carrier, phone manufacturer, technology service provider, and mobile application developer. The first three actors, who feature segmentation within each of themselves, have a profound impact on the last group, the mobile application developer. The mobile application developer must run through a gauntlet of important decisions and choices to create a successful and marketable application. In this thesis we will outline the mobile market and provide insight into mobile application development. We will look at the challenges mobile developers face, and view business models and value chains in the mobile market. We will observe the choices available to mobile application developers in marketing and distributing their mobile applications, the challenges they face with the choice of distribution channel. A framework is developed that aggregates the major mobile application distribution channels to provide a method to locate, purchase, and download a mobile application regardless of its distribution channel.

Ubiquitous learning' is the ability to learn everywhere across many contexts including devices and locations. This is valuable because it can provide a pervasive environment for accessing and sharing information. Statistics have shown that better access to education has been directly associated with improving economic growth and reducing poverty. A ubiquitous learning environment makes it possible to provide better access to education. Unfortunately, the market lacks a mainstream solution that, through open and interoperable design characteristics, is able to promote a ubiquitous learning environment. The goal of this thesis is to demonstrate that Web servicescan assist in supporting an effective ubiquitous learning environment. This goal is achieved through the proposed solution Mookee. Mookee is an online learning platform that makes educational content and services more open and accessible. It allows (1) students to access educational content and tools from any digital device, (2) teachers to create, copy, mix, and share educational content, and (3) developers to build educational applications with that content through services. All of these objectives are accomplished through the support of Web services.

Mobile devices have become an integral part of everyone's daily life. The ability to install new applications has allowed users to fully customize their devices to their needs and preferences. However, there is the problem of developing a different client program for different devices due to the software and hardware differences of each device. Not only would this incur higher software development costs, but it is also inconvenient for the user to find the appropriate version for their device. The use of Web services may solve this problem as they are platform-independent, 'but the exchanging of XML messages involved with Web services uses large amounts of data and requires a powerful processor. Mobile devices are currently not suitable for processing such data and the exchange of such large amounts of data over the cellular network may incur heavy data charges. To solve this problem, we will introduce a framework for mobile devices to find and access Web services through their mobile browser. A registry allows users to search for services while a gateway is used to invoke the Web services and process the XML requests and responses. Therefore, the amount of processing is kept to a minimum on the mobile device. A proof of concept prototype implementation with the ability to register, search, and access Web services was constructed and tested to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. The results from these tests clearly demonstrate the benefits of using a gateway as an intermediary between the Web service and the mobile device as well as the effectiveness ofthe overall framework.

Enterprise software is being transformed from an installed product to a hosted service whereby customers pay a subscription fee to access functionality using a web browser or other clients. The service-oriented architecture (SOA) and web services will play a key role in driving the vision of software as a service. As the number of services and users grow, there is a need for a trusted service broker to manage services offered by service providers and subscribed customers. In this thesis we propose a framework for a service broker for software as a service (SaaS) applications. One of the novel features of this broker is an environment for an Internet desktop that allows users to transparently access and use SaaS applications from anywhere at anytime as long as they have a computer and an Internet connection. This model has a very close resemblance to a thin client model and the old mainframe setup where the terminals really didn't need to have any special CPU power or mass storage capacity. A proof of concept implementation is discussed; it enables users to have an integrated set of applications that closely reflect their business process or the task they are trying to accomplish.

Mobile learning is an emerging trend in educational and training systems. Current mobile learning systems, however, are impractical due to many challenges. Consider for example the wide variety of mobile devices, that exist today with different capabilities and constraints, which has made device-independent delivery of learning content difficult. In this thesis we present the design and implementation of a device-independent platform for mobile learning. Some of the novel features of the platform include: (1) enabling educators to create the educational materials once and generate content for a variety of devices, including cellular phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), smart phones, laptop computers, and PCs; (2) allowing educators to share materials with others through a knowledge-based repository; and (3) offering learners on-line as well as off-line access to the materials from any device.

Mobile Agents (MA) are mentioned frequently in the literature to deal with information overload and disconnected computing. Their results, however, are not applicable in the existing E-commerce infrastructure mainly because currently no Web sites are agent-enabled. Two main reasons why Webmasters are unwilling to let agents run on their sites: (1) lack of business incentives and (2) security issues. We have designed the Havana agent platform to address these issues; it enables its participants to form beneficial business partnerships. In this thesis, we discuss the reasoning behind, design and implementation of the Havana platform. Some of the interesting features in Havana include: (1) ability to be seamlessly integrated into existing E-commerce sites; (2) ability to enable business of different types to form beneficial partnerships; (3) support of location-based services and advertisements; (4) solving MA security issues in a evolutionary approach; and (5) being accessible from both wired and wireless devices.

Service discovery is an integral part of constructing self-configuring Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs). While several service discovery protocols have been developed, most of them are designed for infrastructure-based networks and thus not suitable to be used in MANETs; and those that have been designed for MANETs suffer from two problems. Firstly, they have limited scalability due to the extensive use of broadcast communication. Secondly, they usually lack context aware selection mechanisms and come with reduced interaction standards. This thesis proposes a network layer supported comprehensive service discovery solution that addresses the above issues and provides solutions in two parts. First it discusses a location aware network layer routing protocol that groups mobile nodes into clusters where a gateway at each cluster is responsible for routing. Secondly, it utilizes directories for service discovery that interact with lower network layer gateway configurations. In addition, this service discovery solution includes an agent-based context aware service selection, and provides standard mechanisms for different types of service interaction.