The ProxyGator – Server-side Wireless Toolkit

Mobile devices have characteristics that are totally different from desktop environment- small displays, low processor power, less memory and low bandwidth of the link. New platforms, like Java 2 Micro Edition, have been developed for such types of devices, which provide limited capabilities to the mobile client. For better user experience, most of the mobile applications on the J2ME platform make use of a proxy, which sits on fixed infrastructure and acts as an interface between the client and the server and does a lot of the work on behalf of the mobile clients. Developing applications requires a lot of effort in terms of time, and developing proxy along with client module may increase the development time significantly. To reduce the development time, we are introducing the ProxyGator toolkit. It is a server-side wireless toolkit, which includes an API that provides common functionalities used in a typical proxy, like generating HTTP requests to different websites, parsing the HTML data received from websites, sending the datagram packets, converting the images from any format to PNG format, connecting to the databases, string manipulation and searching the UDDI registry. Also, to make things easy for the developer, a toolbar is provided which provides help on the API, generates code for common functionalities used in a proxy and also provides help on WSDL documentation and UDDI search for the Web Services. Toolkit also includes a wizard, which generates a proxy shell according to the options selected by the developer. This whole toolkit infrastructure is built within Visual C++ 6.0 IDE. We present the ProxyGator Toolkit and give an analysis to show the saving in development time achieved by using this toolkit. 1