Evaluation of the Model-View-Controller design pattern when applied to a heterogeneous application to distribute newspaper textual content to mobile devices

Supple, Sakib (2006). Evaluation of the Model-View-Controller design pattern when applied to a heterogeneous application to distribute newspaper textual content to mobile devices. Student dissertation for The Open University module M801 MSc in Software Development Research Dissertation.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.21954/ou.ro.00016038

Abstract

The rise in mobile device usage is fuelling demand for access to news stories while on the move. The aim of this research is to suggest a suitable design pattern for applications that publish newspaper text content to many different mobile devices. The Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern is often used to design applications of this type. Three competing MVC-based designs are compared using the multi-channel-access bridging pattern. This tests the designs for architectural compatibility with an existing server infrastructure. The selected design pattern, a modified Service to Worker pattern, is used to produce a Blackberry application to publish news content. The user interface is designed using human-centred techniques. This interface is quantitatively evaluated and compared with the application performance requirements. It is qualitatively evaluated using a participatory heuristic inspection technique to test its usability. This evaluation identifies a number of defects in the user interface and recommendations are made to address these. To demonstrate the suitability of the design for heterogeneous applications, the code for the Blackberry version is reused to implement a generic version for mobile phones. The result of the project is a heterogeneous mobile application to publish newspaper text content.

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