Software Development Issues of a Distributed Mobile-Commerce System

The proliferation of mobile devices such as smart phones and Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) opens new ways for developing mobile E-commerce systems (so called Mobile-commerce or M-commerce system). In Mcommerce systems, we still see many common components that we have in standard E-commerce applications, such as web servers and database servers. However, these new applications raise some unique challenges. For example, the limitations of mobile devices (e.g., small screen size and reduced CPU performance) implies that software development is partly different from desktop applications. Questions which are posed when designing M-commerce system include: “What kind of information do the users want to access via mobile devices?”, “How can we provide useful applications with limited user input facility?”, “How can we test a distributed M-commerce system?” In this paper, we discuss about some software development issues for mobile commerce systems from our experiences while developing an M-commerce system for tourists. Our prototype, easyHotel, is an useful software that allows booking hotel rooms via mobile phones.