MashDroid: An Approach to Mobile-Oriented Dynamic Services Discovery and Composition by In-App Search

The popularity of smartphones and tablet computers in recent years makes mobile apps burst. Mobile apps have become the main consumers of the Internet-based services. Compared to traditional applications in the desktop computing era, mobile devices with their apps bring new opportunities and challenges to service computing community, in various aspects like service publication, discovery, interaction, composition, et al. In this paper, we propose a novel data-driven, content-based mobile apps composition approach, called MashDroid, by leveraging a novel In-App Search mechanism, i.e., discovering relevant services for the data and content in apps. Rather than existing techniques that usually integrate fixed Web services, our approach relies on the dynamic service discovery and flexible data exchange between several apps. The unique feature of our approach is enabling the data communication channel between apps by the content index services provided by a leading Android appstore, Wandoujia, which now has over 1,000,000 apps and 200 million users. We employ the In-App Search mechanism to define a RESTful-style app model and resource-oriented app description model. Based on the models, we design a framework for dynamically discovering relevant apps that could be composed with current app's contexts. We implement a prototype to demonstrate our approach.