Cross-platform Rich Widget Runtime System

Widgets are applications implemented with Web technologies, such as XML and JavaScript. With the development of mobile internet and embeddedsystems, widget applications gradually emerge on mobile phones and other clients, and havedeveloped new concepts like mobile widgets and TV widgets. Widget applications runs on a runtime, but many problems exist on current widget runtimes. First of all, different widget APIs and implementations exist, but the API standardization is still in an early age. Second, widget applications have developed onto many operating systems and architectures.However, existing widget runtimes could not satisify the requirement of cross-platform. Therefore a cross-platform widget runtime will definitely accelerate the deployment of widget applications onto different platforms, which has big potential business value for ISPs, mobile manufactures and developers. Last but not least, traditional widget runtime focus on enabling simple applications, which lacks rich features, such asinter-widget communication, gesture recognition and Flash. These features give better experience, which usually only appears on native applications, to the widget applications. So a rich cross-platform widget runtime is needed to solve these problems.This paper propsed an architecture and implementation of a rich cross-platform widget runtime. In the architecture, a system porting layer is used to separate the runtime and the operating system, avoiding the porting effort introduced by OS dependencies. The widget API is provided by a modulized device API framework implemented with WebVM and NPAPI. Some rich features, such as gesture recognition, inter-widget communication and HTML5 based Flash support, are implemented in the widget runtime. In the end, we evaluate the performance of the key part of the widget runtime, figuring out a reference for optimization in the production stage.