Key requirements and new architecture for context-aware web-based device-independent multi-device applications

Cross-platform mobile and web applications become increasingly popular among users. As users begin to use multiple devices, their behavior patterns start to migrate from single-device to multi-device scenarios, where multiple devices are used sequentially or complementary to interact with a user and gather context information. Application developers should follow these trends and focus on multi-device aspects of their applications but efficient and cost effective application development requires proven frameworks and architectures, which are missing in this field. In this paper we identify key aspects of context-aware multi-device device-independent applications that should be supported by such tools and we propose a new application architecture. The presented architecture and conclusions are based on experimental implementations of a sample context-aware device-independent multi-device application called LifeLog.