|
SAMS: Java's API For Mobile Services
by Benoy Jose
Mobile customers today expect more than just text messages and phone calls on their mobile devices. Today's mobile device dubs as a PDA, camera, planner, email client, game station, music player, and chat client. Customers have come to expect that their devices be equipped with the absolute latest features.
At one point, the latest feature was SMS (short message service) messaging. SMS revolutionized the Mobile phone market and is now present with every service. The next new advancement was MMS (multimedia messaging service), which allows media and graphics to be transmitted like short messages.
Such advancements open the market to those third-party application providers who can provide numerous, value-added services on mobile phones through mobile service providers.
However, for third-party vendors who need to provide services on mobile devices, portability is still a problem. The need to create multiple versions for different mobile service providers severely handicaps rapid development of tools and applications. To accelerate rapid development of tools and applications, third-party vendors need a standard interface (an API) to communicate with mobile service providers.
One such API is the Server APIs for Mobile Services (SAMS). SAMS strives to address these portability issues through the JSR 212 specification. The SAMS API provides a standard, protocol independent Java interface to communicate with network servers and mobile service providers.
| Author's Note: At present, the SAMS specification addresses just the SMS and MMS messaging framework. Please refer to the references section for more information on other mobile related APIs. |
SAMS Features
- A common API that can hide the underlying protocols used by the various mobile service providers.
- Simple and easy to use interfaces, which hide the implementation complexity from the programmer.
- A common Java abstraction to create portable applications.
- Utilizes established design patterns and provides a reliable model for Java programming.
- Provides a clean segregation between the API and the API implementation, which makes the implementation independent of the API.
Benefits
- Provides a standard API for sending and receiving Multimedia messages and SMS messages.
- Provides a common framework to allow customers to request and download data from the service provider. The data can be news, ring tones, messages, or promotional material.
- Allows enterprises to access their backend systems like email, calendar, and company directory.
The SAMS Architecture
Conceptually, the SAMS architecture has three major parts: the SAMS API, the SAMS API implementation, and the protocol drivers. Applications interact with the SAMS API, which in turn routes the request to the specific API implementations. The SAMS API implementations have application code to deal with different kinds of protocols through the protocol drivers.
The SAMS architecture can be broken down into the following subdivisions:
- The SAMS Network
- The Common SAMS API
- SAMS Messaging and Deployment
- Options in the SAMS API
- J2EE Integration
New on the Java Boutique:
New Review:
Time Management Made Easy with the Quartz Enterprise Job Scheduler
Why not just use the Java timer API? This open source scheduling
API boasts simplicity, ease-of-integration, a well-rounded feature
set, and it's free!
New Applet:
Reverse Complement
Reverse Complement is a simple applet that converts DNA or RNA
sequences into three useful formats.
Elsewhere on internet.com:
WebDeveloper Java
Lots of Java information on webdeveloper.com
WDVL Java
Thorough Java resource at the Web Developer's Virtual Library.
ScriptSearch Java
Hundreds of free Java code files to download.
jGuru: Your View of the Java Universe
Customizable portal with online training, FAQs, regular news updates, and tutorials.
|
