p2p

SMS-based peer-to-peer (P2P) mobile messaging is already a major revenue source for wireless carriers. It could become mobile commerce's killer application. In the past, SMS (Short Message Service) was a nonprogrammable device native feature. It was difficult to integrate SMS functionalities into custom mobile solutions. But with emerging tools on both the J2ME smart client side and the messaging server side, SMS is becoming increasingly available to enterprise mobile developers. This chapter focuses on the J2ME Wireless Messaging API (WMA), which standardizes SMS APIs for all J2ME platforms. We also discuss third-party tools to integrate SMS functionalities into your J2EE backend applications.

The limitation of SMS is that it works only on the wireless networks. As a result, mobile phone SMS messages cannot reach PDAs in a local WiFi network or PCs using popular Internet instant messaging (IM) systems (e.g., AOL, MSN, Yahoo! IM systems). We also discuss J2ME toolkits and clients for general IP network-based IM systems that can bridge this gap. In particular, a development library for Jabber is discussed.