What is this course all about and what mobile applications are we looking at? How can can we categorize terminals, what is the difference between a phone and smart-phone? Also radio basics to understand the possibilities and limitations of different radio technologies.
WML is the most commonly used markup language for wireless services. All though more and more terminals today support XHTML it is still very useful to use WML. WML also have some features that are important for mobile application. Learning WML will help you build application even if you later work in XHTML.
A closer look at GSM/GPRS networks, how they are built, what capacity they have and a bit on the future. This is a lot more than you need to know to build mobile applications but understanding how networks work will help you understand what we can expect in terms of capacity, location based services, charging etc.
One way to hide latency is to processing on the client and only if needed return to the server for more information. WMLscript is the technology used when developing WML content. Terminals that support XHTML-MP now also start to support ECMAscript.
The HTTP protocol is not the best for low capacity, long latency links. The WAP stack solves many of the problems and is despite the "wap is dead" myth a protocol used more than ever.
The toughest part of developing mobile applications is to get it to run one more than a handful of terminals. Terminals are very different and what looks good on one terminal might be completely unusable on another. Before adapting content we need of course know what terminal we are communication with or at least the characteristics of the terminal.
SMS is so limited in what it can do and yet it is the most used mobile application after voice. With MMS we can do even more and it's not only sending photos.
If you're developing client side applications then J2ME is the choice. All newer phones have support for J2ME and for most of the phones it is the only way to but a application on the terminal. We will look at how J2ME differs from J2SE and how we can deploy an application.
How do we make our content available to users, how can we control our copyright and how can we charge people? There is quite a lot of support in mobile networks and it's easier to charge for content. There are of course also ways to fool the system :-)
How easy is it to track someone in a mobile network? Who gets access to the information and how can it be used in applications?
3G is the evolution from regular GPRS networks with a new radio interface that provides much higher data rates. IP Multimedia Subsystem is the all IP network that will host services accessed through SIP. We will take a helicopter view of 3G/IMS and see what it actually means for application development.
Drutt Corporation is a pioneer when it comes to mobile content provisioning. The founders of the company developed one of the first WAP Portals in the world, for Telia Mobile in the late 1990ies. Drutt is today a leading provider of mobile content delivery platforms and solutions to for example Vodafone Live!
Squace is a newly started company with an innovative user interface for navigating large sets of content providers. The interface is provided through a client side application built using J2ME and RSS feeds. It is an interesting application from a user interface perspective but also illustrates how one can collect and process information from various sources.
Terraplay has developed and operates a platform to publish and operate mobile games. This give game developers an opportunity to advertise their games and make them available for mobile operators. The games selected by an operator comes complete with provisioning, server support, community etc. If you have question son J2ME games, what works and what sells, then Terraplay can give you the answers.