Want to test midlets on real phones?


Most mobile phone manufacturers offer emulators to help developers with software tests. Java and C++ programming environments usually provide plug-in facilities for emulators. Products such as Pulsar go a step further to integrate and maintain the entire development space.

Although emulators catch a fair amount of design and runtime errors, software behaviour on real phones is unpredictable. For most developers it is not financially feasible to test the behaviour of their mobile applications on all target platforms. To get around this obstacle some companies offer on-line services that allow for application testing on real devices. These services are often expensive.

In software provided by phone manufacturers multiple instances of the emulator are invoked to simulate the behaviour of federated handsets. One solution is to run an instance of the application on a PC and set up a local communication channel with a real phone.

A neat, inexpensive and elegant solution is available. Bluecove , software developed by the open source community, facilitates communication between a simulated mobile application (Midlet) and a real phone via a bluetooth stack. Bluecove exposes the Connected Limited Device Configuration (CLDC) API (using the Generic Connections Framework, GCF) and the Bluetooth JSR-82 API to the Midlet. Java Native Interface (JNI) libraries communicate with the host PC operating system and the Bluetooth stack. This stack is responsible for negotiating and setting up the actual Bluetooth device. The Bluetooth Controller (as per JSR-82) takes care of hardware initiation (USB, dongle or embedded) and over-the-air communication with the real phone.

One reliable PC-phone emulator is another open source product, Microemulator.

A complete development environment can be set up through a cocktail of open source software (MTJ, Microemulator and Bluecove) and free downloads (Intel bluetooth drivers, Widcomm and Broadcom).

Comments

Anonymous said…
Very interesting piece of work Mr Simposya
July 24, 2010 at 8:20 PM
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