Earticle

We describe and analyze the experiences from a cross-platform mobile middleware project. Our 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. The observations in our work include the importance of maintaining the relevant conventions of the various platforms in the code and understanding the asymmetric difficulty in porting code between different platforms. We also determine the amount of cross-platform support related code in an example software module.