J2ME - Pocket PC: neded advices on how to plan the application

Question

Hi,
I plan to port to the Pocket PC platform an e-commerce application I developed using JSP/Servlet with BC4J (some pages use direcltly JDBC).
My actual web application has those architecture and features:
- the database is Oracle 8.1.6;
- the output of the application is HTML (no use of Applets), with some JavaScript and css StyleSheets;
- the application has the standard features of an online-shop, such as shopping cart management, product search;
- the application gives to the customer other informations, such as order-tracking, sending of news documents to the customers, ecc...
My PDA application should have this features:
- on-line and off-line work (connected to the Internet or to a local replica of the database);
- Only the shopping features are requested.
I have some doubts on the best strategy to follow to develop such an application:
- Which database to use (Oracle lite or XML files or ???) to store the data on the PDA?
- How to manage the data replication?
- For the on-line work, I think that the user can connect to the standard Web Application (or to an optimized version for little screens). What is your opinion?
- For the off-line work, I am not sure which GUI to use for the client (HTML or Swing)? I read on this forum about problems with css with Pocket IE; have I to avoid the use of css stylesheets?
- If I write my application using BC4J, how big will be all the application in Mb (jars, application server, etc...)?
- Which software do I need for the development and for the deployment (I am now downloading the J2ME Extension and Viewlets)?
- Other issues I have to care about?
All help and/or samples and/or useful links/readings are welcome.
Thanks,
Marco.

Answer 1

Marco,
Considering the processing capabilities of a Pocket PC, I wouldn't go for J2ME, with is mostly dedicated to the cell phones. The PDAP (PDA Profile) for J2ME is not available yet, and your UI would look pretty poor on a Pocket PC as the only available profile so far is the MIDP (Mobile Information Device Profile).
The other solutions you suggest sound much better, like Oracle Lite. OLite has native synchnronization capabilities with Oracle Enterprise Edition, and that would address your replication needs. Plus it provides a connected/disconnect feature for HTTP/Servlet/HTML that makes the user work transparent. I do beleive that this is avalaible for the Pocket PC as well.
You should serach OTN this way for white papers, demos and sample code.
Please let us know if you need more information,
Olivier