What is Mobile Domain

A software pattern describes the core of the solution to a problem which tends to (re-)occur in a particular environment. Such patterns are commonly used as a means to facilitate the creation of architectural design satisfying the desired quality goals. In this chapter, the authors present first the challenges of applying patterns in mobile application development and give an overview of the patterns that are potentially useful in this domain. After that, they introduce a novel approach for organising patterns for mobile applications based on architectural model. In this approach, the identification of relevant patterns is considered as the process of reducing the set of candidate patterns by using constraints, such as required functionality and limitations of mobile terminals. Some of these constraints can be incorporated in a company-specific architectural model reflecting the commonalities in the solutions developed in the company. In this case, pattern lookup can be facilitated by cataloguing patterns according to the elements of this model. This approach has been validated with existing real company case application.