With the convergence of two technological developments,
wireless communication and portable information appliances, a new paradigm of computing
called mobile computing is becoming a reality. However, due to the intrinsic
constraints of mobility such as small, slow, battery-powered portable devices,
and variable low-bandwidth communication links, the design and deployment of
non-trivial mobile applications are complicated. How to cope with these
constraints is a hot research area as well as a demand of the PDA market,
especially with the advent of the PalmPilot. One
promising technique to address this problem is mobile code. Code mobility can
make mobile applications adapt to the context changes and hence improve its
performance on mobile devices with the aid of a proxy server.
In this thesis, we present our experiences from porting an existing mobile code toolkit for Windows CE (DMOT) to a new kind of emerging resource-constrained portable device, Palm IIIc. The new version of DOMT for this environment is called KMOT: KVM-based Mobile Object Toolkit. KMOT is designed as a platform for mobile code applications on WinCE and PalmOS. Its performance has been evaluated by several benchmarks, and hence we can conclude that, under certain conditions, mobile code is a feasible artifact to overcome the constraints in mobile computing, even for resource-constrained portable devices, and KMOT is a useful toolkit to realize the code mobility.