Study On Applying Web Services In Mobile E-business--Implementation Of A Mobile Auction System Based On Web Services

In today's e-business world, the use of mobile technologies is steadily on the increase. The next generation e-business will be mobile e-business.Meanwhile, the current trend in the application space is moving away from tightly coupled monolithic systems and towards systems of loosely coupled, dynamically bound components. Web service is the next stage of evolution for e-business. The web services architecture provides several benefits such as promoting interoperability, enabling just-in-time integration, reducing complexity by encapsulation, and enabling interoperability of legacy applications.Web service has evolved to its maturity period. With the potential market in mobile e-business growing rapidly, the demand for access to digital information using web services from mobile devices emerges.J2ME is targeted to devices with limited horsepower and is supported by 90% of newdevices released to market. J2ME has a runtime environment that provides a secure and portableplatform and a very large developer community. Soft companies have done a lot to provide J2MEdevices the ability of accessing web services, and several products had been published (such askSOAP).However, these developers' packs are not standard APIs on J2ME. Developers who want to use web services on J2ME platform have to embed these packs in each application ?an especially expensive proposition in resource-constrained devices like mobile phones and personal digital assistants.Fortunately, JCP(Java Community Process) has released WSA1.0(JSR172) just recently. The goal of WSA is to integrate fundamental support for web services invocation and XML parsing into the device's runtime environment, so developers don't have to embed such functionality in each application.The "Bid-joy" mobile auction system, a typical case of mobile e-business, is built with web services in a standard way. It applies the newly released WSA 1.0 API to achieve accessing web services on mobile devices. It's ready to be put to market and just waiting for devices that support the WSA API.