Device-Independent Architecture for ubiquitous applications

The part of the Internet of Things composed of devices that directly interact with users has grown considerably in the past years. With new smartphones, tablets and other Internet-enabled devices that appear on the market, this trend is still increasing. However, existing application development processes and tools, designed for single device applications, do not allow developers to fully and efficiently address this opportunity. Applications are developed for a particular type of devices or a particular programming platform. This limits the number of potential users and makes it difficult to seamlessly use an application on multiple devices owned by users. To take full advantage of the Internet of Things, applications should be able to run on any device--they should be ubiquitous. In this paper, we present a concept of Device-Independent Architecture, which provides separation of applications from devices and facilitates development of device-independent applications. Additionally, the separation introduced by the Device-Independent Architecture enables implementation of multi-device scenarios where a single application employs multiple devices at the same time. The experiment described in the paper proves that such device-independent applications indeed may be used on any suitable device--they have a chance to become ubiquitous.