Handheld Computing and Programming for Mobile Commerce

Using Internet-enabled mobile handheld devices to access the World Wide Web is a promising addition to the Web and traditional e-commerce. Mobile handheld devices provide convenience and portable access to the huge information on the Internet for mobile users from anywhere and at anytime. However, mobile commerce has not enjoyed the same level of success as the ecommerce has so far because mobile Web contents are scarce and mostly awkward for browsing. The major reason of the problems is most software engineers are not familiar with handheld devices, let alone programming for them. To help software engineers better understand this subject, this article gives a comprehensive study of handheld computing and programming for mobile commerce. It includes live major topics: (i) mobile commerce systems, (ii) mobile handheld devices, (iii) handheld computing, (iv) server-side handheld computing and programming, and (v) client-side handheld computing and programming. The most popular server-side handheld applications are mostly functioning through mobile Web contents, which are constructed by using only few technologies and languages. On the other hand, various environments/languages are available for client-side handheld computing and programming. Five of the most popular are (i) BREW, (ii) J2ME, (iii) Palm OS, (iv) Symbian OS, and (v) Windows Mobile. They are using either C/C++ or Java programming languages. This article will explain J2ME, a micro version of Java, and Palm OS programming, using C, by giving step-by-step procedures of J2ME and Palm application development.