Event Manager Application for Android

Event Manager Application for

Android

CONTENT

• PROBLEM STATEMENT • OUR SOLUTION

• TOOLS AND SOFTWARE USED • SEQUENCE DIAGRAMS

• SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE • OBJECTIFY FRAMEWORK • CBSE PRINCIPLES USED • RESULTS

• FUTURE ENHANCEMENTS • REFERENCES

PROBLEM STATEMENT

An event managing application for smartphones that connects

people together, creating groups of users and sharing their events within groups.

Existing applications in the market that perform this activity,

• STAR event manager for Blackberry (Personal event manager/To-do, cannot share event alerts with friends, $9.99)

OUR SOLUTION

• Event manager application for the Android OS that does more

than act as a to-do list manager.

• Registered users can create groups and send e-mail

invitations to request users to join the group.

• Each group has a number of users and each user can create

events that will be visible to members of the group

CHALLENGES TO CROSS PLATFORM

MOBILE APP DEVELOPMENT

1. Software developers have to spend a lot of time to learn how to start programming on and familiarize themselves with each kind of OS’s SDKs and APIs.

2. As the constant emergence of new smart phone OS, it is inefficient and uneconomic to migrate all software developed to new platform, because you have to do the same operations again.

3. It is complex to maintain the different versions of mobile application that runs on different OS. To update app of one OS, we have to

update all versions of this application that runs on other OSs. It is difficult to maintain consistency of the application. [1]

TOOLS AND SOFTWARE USED

• Android SDK Revision 15 for Android 2.3.3 (API 10)

• Android development tools plugin 15.0.1 for Eclipse 3.7 which is the officially supported IDE

• Google App Engine to host server

• Objectify- An open source persistence data framework for App Engine Data Store

ANDROID

What is Android?

• It is the fastest growing mobile operating system in the world. It is developed by the Open Handset Alliance led by Google.

• It currently is the OS of choice for Motorola, HTC, Samsung, Sony and Ericsson.

Why Android?

• Simple and powerful SDK, no licensing fees and a thriving developer community.

• Offers an excellent enterprise platform by using a popular enterprise programming language such as Javas [2]

UI-SEQUENCE DIAGRAMS

UI-SEQUENCE DIAGRAMS

UI-SEQUENCE DIAGRAMS

UI-SEQUENCE DIAGRAMS

UI-SEQUENCE DIAGRAMS

ARCHITECTURE DESCRIPTION

• We have used a blackboard architecture for our system.

The blackboard model is represented in 3 parts:

Knowledge sources, Blackboard data structure and control [3]

• The Google App Engine data store acts as the database and stores all the user, group and event information.

• The web application acts as the blackboard holding the current state of events.

• Each device with the Android app installed acts as the

client/knowledge sources and connects to the Data Store via blackboard.

OBJECTIFY FRAMEWORK

• Open source persistent framework for the Google app

engine (GAE) data store.

• The GAE data store acts is not an RDBMS, it is more of

a persistent hash map.

•

ENTITY

– hash map of name value pairs

•

DATA STORE

– hash map of keys to entites

•

OPERATIONS

– get() an entity whole from DS

put() an entity whole into DS

delete() an entity from DS

query() for entities [4]

CBSE PRINCIPLES USED

• Developers need to port their applications to other operating systems without having to develop all the components of their applications each time they release it for a different OS

• A Reusable program should be transportable, an orthogonal

(context-independent) composition, and independent of the runtime system. [5] Hollingsworth proposed a set of discipline for

constructing high-quality components based on Correctness, Composability, Reusability, and Understandability. [6]

• We will employ CBSE principles of code reuse to use our Android application on the Blackberry OS.

EXPECTED RESULTS

Successfully implement an Android application for event

management which is hosted on the Google App Engine

and utilizes the Google Data Store

FUTURE ENHANCEMENTS

* Add additional functionalities to Android

application such as improved UI, deployment on

the Android market.

*

Develop the event manager application for the

REFERENCES

[1] Biao Pan, Kun Xiao, Lei Luo “Component-based mobile web application of cross platform” 2010 10th IEEE International Conference on Computer and Information Technology (CIT 2010)

[2] Android developers web site. http://developer.android.com/index.html

[3] David Garlan and Mary Shaw, "An Introduction to Software Architecture", Technical Report CMU-CS-94-166, January 1994.

[4] Introduction to Objectify. http://code.google.com/p/objectify

appengine/wiki/IntroductionToObjectify

[5] Ramachandran, M. and Sommerville, I. (1995) A framework on automating reuse guidelines, Proceedings of Intl. conf. on software engineering and knowledge

engineering (SEKE95), USA.

[6] Hollingsworth, J (1992). Software components design for reuse: a language independent discipline applied to Ada, PhD thesis, Dept. of computing and Information, Ohio State Univ., Columbus, December.