Experience with Top Gun Wingman: a proxy-based graphical web browser for the 3Com PalmPilot

  • Authors:

  • Armando Fox;Ian Goldberg;Steven D. Gribble;David C. Lee;Anthony Polito;Eric A. Brewer

  • Affiliations:

  • University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA;University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA;University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA;University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA;University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA;University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA

  • Venue:
  • Middleware '98 Proceedings of the IFIP International Conference on Distributed Systems Platforms and Open Distributed Processing
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

After an inauspicious debut, communication-enabled personal digital assistants (or PDA's) and handheld PC's are being "rediscovered" as mobile information access terminals. In response, developers have attempted to bring complex applications such as Web browsers to such devices. However, the limited resources available on thin client platforms make them unsuitable for hosting such applications. In this paper, we advocate moving application complexity from thin clients to an adaptive middleware proxy (AMWP), an infrastructural application server platform designed to support large populations and diverse applications. We describe one such application, Top Gun Wingman, a graphical, split Web browser for the Palm Pilot PDA that is currently in use by more than 11,000 users around the world. Our discussion focuses on the design philosophy, implementation, performance, and lessons learned from our experience with the Wingman client and the middleware proxy that supports it.