Building a Wireless e-mail Application

The advent of cell phones with integrated web browsers and access to the Internet has opened up the possibility of accessing data on a personal computer from a cell phone.

This application was developed in order to illustrate the power and potential of using a Service Oriented Architecture to enable a cell phone to access programs on a personal computer. The Microsoft Outlook suite of programs was chosen as the target  set of programs for the application. The features supported are:

• Outlook Mail - read, create, delete, and forward mail
• Outlook Contacts - list, read, create, modify, delete, and search contacts
• Outlook Calendar - create, modify, and delete calendar entries by time for date, today, yesterday, tomorrow
• Outlook Tasks - create, modify, and delete tasks

Because of the limited screen size on a cell phone, each of the features also contained various ways of limiting the amount of data shown on the screen at any one time.

This application was developed and tested in just seven days. Another company is selling a commercial product that provides similar functionality. According to their business plan, they spent 9 million dollars on their development effort.

To see how this application was developed using nTegrator, click here.