Next Generation Wireless Applications: Creating Mobile Applications in a Web 2.0 and Mobile 2.0 World, 2nd Edition

9

Using J2EE for Mobile Services

In the previous chapters, we introduced J2EE as a platform for building mobile applications and then went on to establish the dominant communications paradigms for establishing interaction between our mobile device and the J2EE platform; namely HTTP and its wireless companions in the WAP family. We now want to look at how J2EE works in more detail and to understand exactly how its powerful infrastructure software services support our proposed communications paradigms. We shall proceed to look at devices in some detail in the following two chapters.

In this chapter we shall also look at how we make sure that the platform can be accessed securely, both in terms of implementing security within the J2EE environment and then ensuring that we can extend security policies to the devices, and ultimately, the users. It would be no use implementing a fancy means of making sure that only authorised users access a particular mobile service on the server if we then couldn't enforce this via the device, so we need to examine security within the entire mobile network context, revisiting our mobile network model.

In building our platform, we shall look at how harnessing the power of J2EE to support mobile devices is not enough. We also need to be able to support access to our mobile services platform by other participants who want to offer their services to the end-users whilst taking advantage of any common infrastructure built upon the J2EE platform. We shall ...