Welcome to Peer2Me!
Peer-to-Peer for J2ME (Peer2Me) is an open source project developing a framework for mobile collaborative applications on mobile phones. We want to take advantage of the new mobile technology, including Java-enabled mobile phones together with some kind of Personal Area Network (PAN) technology, and offer new kinds of collaborative applications for users all over the world! With this project we gather ideas from many existing research domains. To get an overview of which research domains this project are related,
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Motivation
The market for mobile technology has increased almost exponentially recently. In Norway, an many other western countries, over 90% of the population own a mobile phone. During the last couple of years, mobile phones have started to support more than one transport medium (the cellular network provided by the telecom operators). Mobile phones now more and more supports some kind of PAN technology. This project aims to utilize mobile phones and PAN technology to make new kinds of applications.
Technology and possibilites
PAN (like Bluetooth, IR, WLAN, Zigbee, and more) are low cost, low range networks that allow users to create spontaneous ad hoc networks that do not depend on any central node. These ad hoc network technologies enable mobile phones to detect and connect to other mobile phones that are in sufficient proximity and form mobile Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks.These networks are ideal for transmission of information and synchronization data, making them a viable solution for sending messages between users in a mobile network. Utilizing PAN technology for mobile phones enables a broad range of new collaborative applications supporting collocated and spontaneous interaction.
Why a framework?
Instead of designing a specific application showing the possibilites and the usage of the technology, we have decided to develop a framework. When we use the term framework, we refer to an object oriented framework defined Johnsen and Foote as: "A set of classes that embodies an abstract design for solutions to a family of related problems". Peer2Me will allow developers to generate applications enabling higher productivity and shorter development time. The framework deals with the network infrastructure that handles the communication between the nodes in the network and provides an applications interface for fast and easy development. All in all we would like to contribute to the development of a standard for ad hoc collaborative applications!