MyMIDP and MyMIDP-Client: Direct Access to MySQL Databases from Cell Phones

Cell phones are no longer merely used to make phone calls or to send short or multimedia messages. They more and more become information systems clients. Recent developments in the areas of mobile computing, wireless networks and information systems provide access to data at almost every place and anytime by using this kind of lightweight mobile device. But even though mobile clients support the Java Mobile Edition or the .NET Micro Framework, most information systems for mobile clients require a middleware that handles data communication. Oracle Lite [Ora04a, Ora04c, Ora04b] and IBM’s DB2 Everyplace [IBM04a, IBM04b] use a middle-ware approach for synchronizing data between client and server. Microsoft’s SQL Server CE [Mic08] needs Active Sync and Sybase Adaptive Server Anywhere [Syb08] either uses SQL-Remote and its message oriented replication or MobiLink as a session based approach. All these systems are designed for handling replicated data [KRTH07] but not for simple client/server data access. In previous works [CIIH07, ICH07] we used a simple web service that forwards queries to the server and returns the result to the requesting client using an HTTP-connection. However, this approach is comparable to the middle-ware solutions and requires additional software (the web service) that might be an additional point of failure. Java’s JDBC provides a standard way to access databases in Java, but this interface is missing in Java ME. In this paper we present our implementation of an MIDP-based Java ME driver [HSWM09] for MySQL similar to JDBC that allows direct communication of MIDP applications to MySQL servers without a middleware. We illustrate the usage of the driver by our prototype MySQL client for MIDP enabled mobile phones.