A configurable, heterogeneous device cloud for web applications

A key challenge during the development of Web applications on top of multiple heterogeneous devices is to discover and get access to device-specific resources. This paper shows an architecture which enables and virtualizes the resources of user devices whereupon the device-owner controls the access to his resources with a user-configurable rule-based system. User resources are mapped to a RESTful API, so that Web applications can easily use them. In doing so, the communication protocols or API's used by the underlying resource are completely hidden from the user of the RESTful API. This increases the interoperability for a looser coupling between the parts of distributed devices, because the user can replace resources with new ones without an update of the Web applications, which use these resources. This facilitates the creation of mashups, which combine traditional Web 2.0 services with user resources. Users control the access to their resources with a user-configurable rule-system.