Building Mobile Tourist Guide Applications using Different Development Mobile Platforms

The rapid proliferation of mobile computing technology has massive potential for providing access to different services at any time and from anywhere. The mobile telephone is more than just making calls. It allows accessing several applications and services via the internet connection or by building stand-alone applications. The mobile telephone has a considerable effect in tourism by allowing the user to access the contents from Internet or from an install application over the mobile devices. The existing tourist guide applications use the latest technologies to enhance the application quality by satisfying the user’s requirements. These applications encounter great challenges because of limited mobile resources. Several development platforms for mobile applications are used to design tourist guide applications a caused to mobile devices incompatibility. Some of these applications are designed using, for example, J2ME which represents an effective language for small and portable devices. But, the ideal platform, now, for this type of applications is Android, it is designed to improve efficiency and reduce resource consumption compared to J2ME. The most used technology is Java programming languages but Android is more powerful, flexible and Android phones have more functionality than J2ME phones. In this paper, we build electronic tourist guide systems using the two technologies to confirm the powerful of Android. For this reason, a comparison between the two systems is made. The applications are tailored to user preferences, so that the user can access the application from a simple interface or automatically; the information may be displayed according to GPS positioning system. The system is built to be a tourist guide for Jordan, but it is flexible and easy to be for any country. To do that, the administrator need to know the GPS coordinates of each point of interest, and then the desired information may be added to database.