General System Structure
Figure 1: General System Structure
Our EAN-13 bar code recognition and resolution toolkit contains two parts: the barcode recognition component running entirely on J2ME enabled mobile phones that support the MMAPI9 (Mobile Media APIextension) extension and the Java based information server component, which is located on a separate server, to which the detected product code is transmitted via a GPRS (or for local demonstration a Bluetooth) connection. The provided client provides functionality to recognize an EAN13 code, communicate with the server and display the results. The information server uses a plug-in architecture, allowing us to quickly add various services and online information sources (represented as so called “service connectors”). Although this process could also be located on the phone itself, performing them on an external server provides us with greater extendibility, higher flexibility and better performance.