An Android-based Instant Message Application

One of the learning outcomes listed by ACM mobile computing education is to “Implement a simple application that relies on mobile and wireless data communications”. This Android-based Instant Message Application is aimed to meet this outcome. Since the Android mobile platform was first open sourced by Google in November 2007, it has attracted more than 180,000 developers and the deployment of 50,000 mobile applications in the Android Market. Today more than 60 smart phones from major manufactures run the Android platform. All these numbers show that the Android project has gained momentum and has moved forward. In addition to its openness, all the tools in the Android development are free and no special hardware is required. These factors motivated us to practice this application on the Android platform. This paper presents an application that is developed based on the Android operating system, using Eclipse with a plugin. The programming language is Java. The project is tested on an Android Emulator which is a tool that allows developers to easily test an application without having to install the application on a real device. The Android-based instant message application uses the client/server architecture. The client can add a registered user to be his/her friend and send or receive a text message while the friend is on-line. Currently, the communication in this application is using TCP. A MySQL database is used as a backbone to store the user information.