PDA Development Based on JAVA/J2ME

Situation

This is a UK client dedicated to providing information for bodybuilding clubs. He had a general idea to motivate the members' passion for bodybuilding which is to combine the PDA/Cell Phone and website together for more convenient data querying.

Solution                                                                                       

Since there was no detailed requirement specification, shinetech initially focused on requirement gathering, keeping frequent communication with the client by phone, MSN, and email, then detailed the requirement, and designed a suitable system architecture.

We recommended the technology of Remote Web Service with the view to keeping the data synchronization between the PDA/Cell Phone and the website. It is a popular and effective combination of PDA/Cell Phone + Website + Web Service, which features for the stability, flexibility, more convenient and friendly operation. The suggestion received a favorable report from the client.

This is a services platform dedicated to bodybuilding clubs. It consists of three parts:

• PDA/Cell Phone Application
  The main functions of the application are to collect the training data, make the effect statistic, gather the goal of bodybuilding and so on.
  
  The technologies we used in this part are J2ME MIIDP 2.0, and K-Soap allows the Web service access from the smart mobile client end.

• Web Site
  The website allows for various operations such as comparing of the profile and the fitness effect, making friends, etc.
  
  The classical architecture of Struts + Hibernate + Spring + JSTL was adopted in the website design to ensure a stable system.

• Web Service
  Through Web Service, the remote database can be accessed by the PDA/Cell Phone application and the Web site application, and the third party company as well.
  
  In addition, XFire as a high performance, multi-support, and friendly used Java SOAP framework was adopted for higher security and efficiency.

Challenges

• Cross-platform
  We identified JAVA as the main development language, thus allowing for cross-platform running of the system which was also what the client required. 
• Compatibility
  During the development, we found that the same Java program running on different PDAs and Cell Phones brought the different results. It is necessary for us to have a special widget to resolve the problem of incompatibility. But the project schedule and the budget is not affordable for us to develop a new J2ME widget, so lots of open source widgets were analyzed and evaluated to achieve the maximize compatibility and reduce the cost as well.
• Data synchronization
  The data can be obtained and managed by logging on the website application, while the PDA/Cell Phone application enables users to take the data offline, and update them locally. The operations will lead to data conflict and confusion if it could not keep synchronizing for the remote database and the local database resided in the PDA/Cell Phone application.
  • We added the corresponding condition for the updating of each piece of data to ensure the PDA data integrality when offline.
  • On the side of the data facticity and validity, a special program which is almost 3000 lines was written to ensure that all data is the latest.

Results

The project was delivered on time and within budget. It has been marketed as a standard software solution for the health industry, and has been used by several bodybuilding clubs.

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