Designing Transparent Location-Dependent Web-Based Applications on Mobile Environments

This paper describes an architecture model designed to allow the development of web-based client-server applications where results should be dependent of the location of the client on a mobile (normally wireless) environment. It has been designed to work with the most popular technologies used nowadays which are available in every modern personal computer such as

HTTP

protocol client-server internetworking,

802.11

wireless networks,

Bluetooth

,

IR

or

RFID

devices. This system is divided into three user transparent subsystems: the first one obtains the location of the client computer from the hardware installed on it, the second one works as a proxy and embeds this obtained location into the

HTTP

request generated by the user’s web browser, and the last one, installed in the

HTTP

application server controller, extracts the location from the request and offers the programmer a complete object oriented API that allows to code a web program that will generate a client-location dependent

HTTP

response. Thus the

HTTP

response to a client request is dependent of the location of the client at the moment the request was generated.