J2MEMicroDB: an open source distributed database engine for mobile applications

Abstract

Mobile distributed applications must be able to work offline when no network connection is available, or simply to spare bandwidth or money. To do so the mobile client must be able to store and handle structured data. Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME) does not support neither object serialization nor relational table management. When most legacy systems still rely on database engines, it also seems that J2ME only considers the Webservices API as a tool to access data on the server side. No JDBC API is provided to send and retrieve data from the mobile device to the DBMS in the server. This paper presents an Open Source library for J2ME that implements a lightweight database engine that allows CDLC devices (such as the currently available mobile phones) to handle object serialization easily, SQL relational database management and JDBC, using SQL to access any DBMS in the mainframe.