Abstract:

Advancements in wireless technology have led to the emergence of a wide variety of wireless devices like PDAs and cell phones. A number of applications like word processors have been developed to run on these devices and among the most popular are gaming applications. The eXtensible Markup Language (XML) is an emerging technology for describing and interchanging data among various systems and databases. In this project, we will develop a Pokemon-style game played on wireless devices that uses a stripped down XML language that we create to communicate with a centralized Oracle Database. Various properties of our language and game set-up will be tested for efficiency and playability.

In this project, we have a number of wireless users on the one hand and an Oracle database on the other. Each player starts a game on a PDA and chooses an option about what kind of player he will be. After that, his choice is recorded into the centralized database. Depending on the type of player, the centralized database will assign an initial task to each player, and when one device gets into the range of another device then the devices will beep as an indication. If two people decide to play each other, they can point their devices at each other and send some token for the verification of transaction occurrence between them. In addition, if one player agrees that the other player's goal was completed, an additional token will be given to players. Also, players can synchronize with central database to update their scores, and the central database will assign new tasks and new powers to players. The Central database has a high score list which can be synchronized with the palm devices. The central database keeps track of all XML based messages that have passed between the devices and chooses next goals based on this information. Communication between players can be achieved using beaming and Bluetooth technologies.

CS297 Results

• Implemented the state of a TicTacToe board in XML and displayed it using JAVA swing.
• Designed and implemented a play on the TicTacToe board using Client Server program and JDBC. The game will update the state of the TicTacToe board in the database after each move.Oracle9i feature of XMLType table was used to store the state of a TicTacToe board.
• Designed and implemented a Palm Pilot application to store Person's information into the database and to retrieve and display person's information on the list interface.

Proposed Schedule

Key Deliverables:

• Software
  1. Distributed game that supports multiple players on different Palm devices managed by a centralized windows machine.
  2. Framework for the Palm devices to connect to the windows machines via Bluetooth using an XML based language for messages.
  3. Palm devices communicate between each other using Bluetooth or beaming and exchange tokens securely.
  4. An Oracle database will be used to maintain the game state, and XML messages will be converted to XML queries to determine properties of the game state. Different concurrency control techniques will be tested for maintaining game state.
• Report
  1. Description of the game that will be implemented on Palm devices.
  2. Description of the design and implementation of my project.

Innovations and Challenges

• Implementing security protocols/algorithms for a token exchange between devices and central database.
• Maintaining consistent state between all databases when multiple players access the centralized database at the same time.
• Integration of different sophisticated technologies like beaming, Bluetooth, and XML requires considerable effort.
• Use of Oracle9i and XML- Cutting edge technology.

References:

[EN00] Elmasri, R. A., & Navathe, S. B. (2000). Fundamentals of Database Systems(3rd ed.). Addison-Wesley.

[F00] Foster, L.R. (2000). Palm OS Programming Bible. Hungry Minds, Inc.

[HM02] Harold, R. E., & Means, S.W. (2002). XML in a Nutshell (2nd ed.). O'Reilly.

[KBGP01] Kaljuvee, O., Buyukkokten, O., Garcia-Molina, H., Paepcke, A.(2001,April). Efficient Web Form Entry on PDAs. Proceedings of the tenth international conference on World Wide Web,663-672.

[LLF98] Leventhal, M., Lewis, D., & Fuchs, M. (1998). Designing XML Internet applications. PrenticeHall.

[RG02] Ramakrishnan, R., & Gehrke, J. (2002). Database Management Systems (3rd ed.). McGraw-Hill.

[SM01] Sundaresan, N., Moussa, R. (2001,May). Algorithms and Programming Models for Efficient Representation of XML for Internet Applications. Proceedings of the tenth international conference on World Wide Web, 366-375.

[S01] Suciu, D. (2001,September). On Database Theory and XML.SIGMOD Record (8), 39-45.

[TVBSSZ02] Tatarinov, I., Viglas, D.S., Beyer, K., Shanmugasundaram, J., Shekita, E., Zhang, C. (2002,June). Storing and Querying Ordered XML using a Relational Database System. Proceedings of the 2002 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data, 204-215.