DEVELOPING MOBILE COMPUTING APPLICATIONS

Any portal system today supports user mobility. If I have an Internet mail account like hotmail or yahoo, I can access my mail from anywhere. I need a desktop or laptop com-puter to access my mailbox. I may not be able to access the same mail through some other device like a fixed phone. There are a number of factors that make mobile com-puting different from desktop computing. As a result of mobility the attributes associated with devices, network, and users are constantly changing. These changes imply that con-text and behavior of applications needs to be adapted to suit the current environment. The context and behavior adaptation is required to provide a service that is tailored to the user's present situation. There are several ways in which context and behavior can be adapted. One way is to build applications without any context or behavior awareness. Context and behavior adaptation will be handled by a behavior management middle-ware at the runtime. Other option is to build different applications specific to different context and behavior patterns. There could be systems in the organization, which was originally developed 15 years ago for some direct connected terminals like VT52. Due to change in the market expectation these systems need to be made mobile. Complexities involved in making an existing application mobile versus developing a new mobile system will be different. For a new application it is possible to embed the behavior within the application. However, for a long life system or a legacy application the content behavior adaptation will need to be done externally.

sample

News: This is a very big basket of applications having different types of news. News could be political, current affair, breaking news, business news, sports news, community news etc. While people are in move, they can always be connected to their culture, corn• munity through news using mobile computing. Youth: This is a very high growth market with different applications to suit the style and lifestyle of the youth. These are primarily messaging based application like personco. person messaging. chat. forums.. dating etc. Weather: There are diffeient types of applications and services where mobile comput-ing can make a difference. If we look at very closely when a person is On a vacation, and driving horn one city to another, aCCC:1.3 to weather information can sometime save lives. In this Mike location :MUM weather information is desirable. Notification services on weather is a very sought after application. GPS-based system to locate 9 person (with GI'S receiver) can sometime save lives in ease of natural calamity. Innawnort 17 Corporate application: Standard corporate information is one of the most desirable information set for mobile workers. This will include corporate mail, address book, appointments. MIS applications. corporate Intranet. corporate ERP etc. Sales Force Automation: This group will offer many applications. This will cater the large population of road worriers or sales personnel. Applications will include sides order booking, inventory enquiry, shipment tracking. logistics related applications etc. These applications will be very effective over wireless devices. m-broker: Getting correct and timely Information related to different stocks are very important. Also. online trading of stocks while on move is quite critical for certain lifestyle. Stock ticker. stock alerts, stock quote. and stock trading can be made ubiquitous so that users can check their portfolio and play an active role in this marketplace. Telebanldng: We need to access our banks for different transactions. Earlier people used logo to the bank, but things are changing where banks are coming to customers through te/ebanking. If telebanking can be made ubiquitous it helps everybody, both the cus-tomer and the bank. Many banks in India are today offering banking over Internet (web), voice and mobile phones through SMS.

sample

News: This is a very big basket of applications having different types of news. News could be political, current affair, breaking news, business news, sports news, community news etc. While people are in move, they can always be connected to their culture, corn• munity through news using mobile computing. Youth: This is a very high growth market with different applications to suit the style and lifestyle of the youth. These are primarily messaging based application like personco. person messaging. chat. forums.. dating etc. Weather: There are diffeient types of applications and services where mobile comput-ing can make a difference. If we look at very closely when a person is On a vacation, and driving horn one city to another, aCCC:1.3 to weather information can sometime save lives. In this Mike location :MUM weather information is desirable. Notification services on weather is a very sought after application. GPS-based system to locate 9 person (with GI'S receiver) can sometime save lives in ease of natural calamity. Innawnort 17 Corporate application: Standard corporate information is one of the most desirable information set for mobile workers. This will include corporate mail, address book, appointments. MIS applications. corporate Intranet. corporate ERP etc. Sales Force Automation: This group will offer many applications. This will cater the large population of road worriers or sales personnel. Applications will include sides order booking, inventory enquiry, shipment tracking. logistics related applications etc. These applications will be very effective over wireless devices. m-broker: Getting correct and timely Information related to different stocks are very important. Also. online trading of stocks while on move is quite critical for certain lifestyle. Stock ticker. stock alerts, stock quote. and stock trading can be made ubiquitous so that users can check their portfolio and play an active role in this marketplace. Telebanldng: We need to access our banks for different transactions. Earlier people used logo to the bank, but things are changing where banks are coming to customers through te/ebanking. If telebanking can be made ubiquitous it helps everybody, both the cus-tomer and the bank. Many banks in India are today offering banking over Internet (web), voice and mobile phones through SMS.

Transaction Processing Middleware

In many cases a service will offer session oriented dialogue (SoD). For a session we need to maintain a state over the stateless Internet. This is done through an application server. The user may be using a device, which demands a short transaction whereas the service at the backend offers a SoD. In such cases a separate middleware component will be required to convert a SoD to a short transaction. Management of the Web components will be handled by this middleware as well.