21 December 2007

MUPE
Gateway To Multi-User Games And Services

Nokia has put huge effort into development and researching lately to improve services and to offer more content to their consumers, activity is just incredible last few weeks, lot of new applications, patents, services. I just hope that this very positive trend will be continued next year as well and that will brings more innovative and useful stuff.

Anyway, guys from Nokia Beta Labs definitely aren’t excepted from this trend and they’ve just released the brand new MUPE service.

Multi-User Publishing Environment (MUPE) is an application platform for mobile multi-user context-aware applications. MUPE allows anyone to easily create their own mobile services, games and applications. To achieve these goals, MUPE uses a plethora of technologies to reduce the complexity of developing mobile services.

There are many areas in mobile services, that affect the end-users who are using the services:

• It is difficult to install new applications to mobile phones.
• Online services require data transfer, which results in costs.

From developers perspective there are even more obstacles:

• Mobile applications are difficult to develop due to many reasons, for example the development platform is different from the target platform and on-device debugging is fairly difficult.
• Each change in client software requires a new install on the device to see how it works.
• Developing mobile online services requires a solid communication framework that is designed for mobile networks.

MUPE is designed to overcome these problems as best as possible, using a several techniques. For end-users:

• MUPE uses a single J2ME client in all of the services, and the client can update itself once new versions are available. End-users are required to do a single install only.

For developers:

• Only server side programming is required! Communications framework, client or the basic functionality do not need to be changed.
• MUPE is a complete virtual world, where development can start immediately on the service itself - not supporting technologies. This saves a lot of time and effort.
• MUPE is completely open source, so the developers are free to modify any part of the platform - and have access to all the code that is used. (Including the parts that do not need changes by developers)
• Developer tool plugin for Eclipse offer instructions.
• Platform updates are easy - the communication framework is in a single jar file, and the base content is in another - when the platform is updated it is enough to update these files.

For all:

• MUPE offers data compression - this does not make the system free to use, but reduces the data traffic lowering usage costs
• Graphics are stored in the phone on new service subscription (if the phones support this), further reducing the need of data transfer.
• MUPE uses only Java (client uses J2ME MIDP 2.0, and server J2SE) making the system usable in most mobile phones and most backend systems.
• MUPE is designed to operate through phone calls, SMSes, and other normal mobile phone behaviour.

Learn more from http://www.mupe.net.