Indian Mobile Messenger

CUSTOMER:

A start up company established to build and promote the developed application.

Business Challenge

For the moment, only a limited number of mobile phones on the market support Indian languages. More than 50 million Indian mobile phone users send SMS primarily using the Latin (English) alphabet. An alternative way of exchanging multilingual SMS is crucial.

Software Solution

Axmor J2ME developers have created an Indian Mobile Messenger to address this market need. A messenger can now be loaded into a mobile phone, allowing the user to compose and send short messages read in 5 Indian languages: Hindi, Gujarati, Bengali, Punjabi, Urdu.

One of the challenges for our J2ME developers was that Indian language alphabet was unknown for them before. Despite this fact, we were able to develop the application quickly and efficiently, thus demonstrating our ability to learn quickly.

• Font development

The customer sent us glyph pictures that our developers mapped to the native key code. We used Unicode wherever applicable, and designed a specific code for original symbols. The developers then adjusted the glyphs’ sizes to place more text on the mobile phone screen while still keeping the glyphs visible.

• Scripting rules implementation

Indian alphasyllabary alphabets are more complex then the Latin alphabet since Indian words contain a lot of grammatical information, and letters join together to form new shapes called ligatures. Our customer employed a language consultant, and we helped the consultant to define scripting specifications for our J2ME developers. Based on the scripting specifications, we developed an original ligature-rendering algorithm.

• Interface optimization

A short message sent in Indian font can be read using the developed Indian Messenger application. Our mobile developers also offered the addition of a Push Registry: when such SMS arrives, the messenger automatically starts enabling the mobile phone user to read the message in Indian font immediately. This feature enhanced application usability.

• Application performance

Limited mobile phone memory space places a limitation on the application size. In spite of the large number of letters in Indian alphabets and a variety of scripting rules, our developers kept the application code at a size that doesn’t impede performance.

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BRIEF:

The J2ME application allows mobile phone users to compose and exchange SMS within Indian languages.

BENEFITS: 

• The application is designed to be easily extended to any other language;
• Letter rendering is implemented in full compliance with language rules;
• The developed high performance application utilizes limited memory space;
• Application time-to-market was reduced by consulting the customer in preparing the work order for software product development.

TECHNOLOGIES:

• J2ME
• Push Registry
• Wireless Messaging API 2.0 (JSR 205)