Towards Collaborative Editing of Structured Data on Mobile Devices

Abstract

The age of collaborative editing applications on mobile devices is upon us. However, such applications traditionally rely on centralized servers and thus do not operate in fully decentralized environments. This is a problem on mobile devices where network partitions are the norm due to mobility. Furthermore, such systems typically use either a fixed schema for the data, which makes them inflexible to change and leads to abuse of structured data fields for purposes other than the original intent, or else are based on XML, which limits data to document oriented data stores or else makes querying much more cumbersome for developers and users. In contrast, our Interdroid Versioned Database system provides distributed, fully decentralized, compact, relational, versioned databases for Android powered mobile phones. It offers application designers a unique set of tools for easily building decentralized collaborative applications on Android powered mobile devices using familiar Content Provider and SQL like interfaces. Unfortunately, this system requires that the structure of the database and the user interface (UI) used to edit records in the database to be written at compile time. What users would like is to beable to define and adapt the structure of the data at runtime. What developers would like is a system which makes building structured applications, including editing UI even easier than it is with our prior work. In this paper we present an extension to our Interdroid Versioned Database system which adds the ability to define a Content Provider using an Avro schema, as well as a generic editing interface for instances of that schema. We demonstrate how this system allows us to create powerful data oriented applications at either compile or runtime using an example "ToDo" application, and detail how this work will serve as a basis for our future work on merging shared structured data.