hi guys.. i am a 4th yr Information technology student. we are now in our senior project.. My idea is to access information to a computer from your mobile phone.. A mobile phone named A is connected to a computer that has a databse. If i text mobile phone A, i can access and acquire information from the databse. The mobile phone A accesses the databse and sends me the information i wanted...
if i am a student, i text mobile phone A to get my grades. mobile phone A gets it from the databse from the computer it is connected to..
my question is wat programming language is suited for this? what is the term used for this application because i cannot find resources in the internet? what tips can u give me?
please help me.. i will appreciate it

Hi everyone,

You can use Java. For the mobile phone you can use the java micro edition - for java enabled phones. If the micro edition does not fit your needs then you will have to build your own custom mobile JVM(not something easy). For the database side you can use the standard sdk.

You can also use C/C++ for the computer side but i am not too sure for the mobile side

I am not sure if you can connect to the database from a mobile using sockets but if you can then its a matter of using streams. You have to check out for the socket one.

Richard West

Hi,


I've built this kind of thing a number of times in the past, used 2 way sms to retrieve GPS coordinates from a database via SMS.

The way I did it is below , but you can also do it fairly simply with a mobile connected to a computer.

I'd use Symbian/J2ME to bluetooth or serial to the computer, that'd give you a constant connection to a api (that you'd write) to retrieve the data from you db. Then I'd build it up with an SMS receive client for the mobile phone to pick up the messages, query the db api in and generate the outbound response.

If you know what your doing, it shouldn't be too hard, especially in Java, loads of examples of this kind of thing at Nokia's site.

The other way of doing things is below, but you may specifically be looking to use a mobile phone connected to a computer, but I'll go through the steps anyway

I did it in Java, but you can do exactly the same thing in PHP/ASP/etc . If you are searching on the web then look for a 2 way SMS provider. It can be a bit expensive, but you can get a virtual mobile number for around £400 per year or try running via text anywhere/clickatel or something like that. I ran through Smarttext, but not sure if they are around/offering the same service.

Anyway, you basically set message commands in the text you send in to your number to specify query parms and stuff and then retrieve the data and reply to the mobile phone number with said data, which can all be done via a web page.

If you are short of cash and just want to test it, setup a dynamic ip (no-ip.com) to your laptop, get an SMS provider with callback as a SMS receive option, get it to call a PHP script on your pc which retrieves data from a database (also on your pc) and then extract the number and invoke the send function of your SMS providers http or xml api back to the mobile # that initiated the SMS.

Hope that helps. I love working with SMS so I've done quite a bit of it, if you have any questions or need to know of other resources to help you, just let me know.

Have fun.

Best!

Mambotastic