A Comparison of Terminal Environments for Mobile Web Publishing Clients

Abstract: Human beings have always aspired to share their thoughts with each other. Historical inventions such as letters, writing and, later, the printing press have served to underscore this basic need. With the advent of the Internet, and the World Wide Web, people can now reach a global audience in a cost-effective manner, with an almost insignificant barrier of entry. Services such as blogs and online photo galleries allow users to share their content with their acquaintances or other people located around the world. A characteristic of the Web 2.0 revolution is that people are moving from a passive reader role to a more active one. Previously, the desktop was the only platform that could be used to publish content to the web; however, that is no longer the case. With the advent of mobile devices, the sharing, and thus publishing of content, is moving steadily from the desktop to the mobile. This move creates some challenges due to the constraints placed by the mobile platform. There are multiple kinds of mobile devices, each of them with its own capabilities and limitations. In this thesis, different architectures are compared in order to find a proper design capable of providing an application environment conductive for mobile blogging. Such an environment carries a number of requirements on what it should facilitate. Some of these requirements are essential to enable publishing from the mobile, whereas other enhances the overall functionality of the service. Two different prototypes have being implemented in order to evaluate theadvantages and drawbacks of the most useful architectures.