Guidelines for the Implementation of Cross-Platform Mobile Middleware

The authors describe and analyze the experiences from a cross-platform mobile middleware project. The aim is to identify best practices and provide guidelines for solving similar problems in the context of cross-platform-targeted programming in mobile as well as other environments. The main deliverable of the observed project was a cross-platform implementation of a protocol for maintaining DHT-based Peer-To-Peer (P2P) networks, with an emphasis on mobile operation. The target platforms of the software were Symbian OS, mobile Maemo Linux, and desktop/server Linux distributions. Considering the large number of incompatible mobile platforms in the market, the fluency of cross-platform mobile software development is of particular importance.