MyMIDP

Cell phones are no longer merely used to make phone calls or to send short or multimedia messages. They more and more become information systems clients. Recent developments in the areas of mobile computing, wireless networks and information systems provide access to data at almost every place and anytime by using this kind of lightweight mobile device. But even though mobile clients support the Java Mobile Edition or the .NET Micro Framework, most information systems for mobile clients require a middle-ware that handles data communication. Java’s JDBC provides a standard way to access databases in Java, but this interface is missing in Java ME. Our implementation of an MIDP-based Java ME driver for MySQL similar to JDBC allows direct communication of MIDP applications to MySQL servers without a middleware.

• Hagen Höpfner, Jörg Schad, Sebastian Wendland, and Essam Mansour. MyMIDP: An JDBC driver for accessing MySQL from mobile devices. In Qiming Chen, Alfredo Cuzzocrea, Takahiro Hara, Ela Hunt, and Manuela Popescu, editors, Proceedings of the The First International Conference on Advances in Databases, Knowledge, and Data Applications (DBKDA 2009), March 1-6, 2009, Cancun, Mexico, pages 74–80. IEEE Computer Society, 2009.

As a prove of concept we implemented a prototype client that utilizes the MyMIDP driver. After connecting to a MySQL server the client provides query templates. The user can choose between select, insert, update, and delete. As these templates only support typing in queries the client only preinitializes the query string with the staring keyword of the query. The user has to complete the query string manually but might also remove the key word provided by the templates. After submitting the query to the server, the result is displayed. Due to the limited size of the display we decided to add a unique ID to each tuple and to display the first attribute only. Then, by selecting this ID, the user can display the tuple completely.

• Hagen Höpfner, Jörg Schad, Sebastian Wendland, and Essam Mansour. MyMIDP and MyMIDPClient: Direct Access to MySQL Databases from Cell Phones (Demo). In Johann-Christoph Freytag, Thomas Ruf, Wolfgang Lehner, and Gottfried Vossen, editors, Proceedings of the 13. Conference on Business, Technology, and Web, March 2-6, 2009, Münster, Germany, volume P-144 of Lecture Notes in Informatics (LNI) - Proceedings, pages 604–607, Bonn, Germany, 2009. Gesellschaft für Informatik, Köllen Druck+Verlag GmbH.

Data caching is an appropriate technique for reducing wireless data transmissions in mobile information systems. The literature describes numerous caching approaches on a theoretical level. Semantic, preemptive, or context aware caches are discussed but not implemented for mobile devices or even evaluated in real applications. The problem here is the complexity of data management tools. Software for mobile devices must consider the limited footprint of the used hardware as well as the restrictions of the application programming interfaces. The MyMIDP caching framework provides interfaces that allow to implement the caching approaches discussed in the literature and to test them on MIDP 2.0 enabled mobile devices in a MySQL environment. Hence, we provide researchers with a necessary tool for proofing the efficiency of their caches.

• Hagen Höpfner, Sebastian Wendland, and Essam Mansour. Data Caching On Mobile Devices — The Experimental MyMIDP Caching Framework. In Boris Shishkov, José Cordeiro, and Alpesh Kumar Ranchordas, editors, Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Software and Data Technologie (ICSOFT 2009), July 26-29, 2009, Sofia, Bulgaria, volume 2, pages 256–259, Setúbal, Portugal, July 2009. INSTICC, INSTICC press. ISBN: 978-989-674-010-8.