My name is Philipp C. Heckel and I write about nerdy things.

Posts Tagged / Java


  • Jun 10 / 2012
  • 22
Android, Mobile, Programming

Android Example: Communication between Activity and Service using Messaging

I recently wrote my first little app for my Android smartphone and I was surprised how easy it was. Being familiar with regular Java, learning the new Android APIs was very simple for the most part. However, there was one thing that wasn’t particularly straight forward: communicating between an Activity, i.e. the user interface, and a background Service started by the application. After many hours, I found some sample code on Stack Overflow which I used to create a very generic reusable solution to start, stop and communicate with your own Service implementation.

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  • Aug 22 / 2010
  • 6
Mobile, Programming

Aware Context API (ACAPI) – Using the sensors in Java ME

The capabilities of cell phones increased dramatically in the last few years. While in the old days most mobile phones were primarily used to make phone calls, modern smart-phones are mostly all-round devices. With the possibility of accessing the Internet and the availability of various sensors (e.g. location or noise), mobile applications have become interactive and flexible. The trend towards location-based services and context-awareness allows applications to react on their surroundings and to behave intuitively towards the user.

For developers, context-awareness can be both a blessing and a curse. While the mobile operating systems iPhone OS and Android come with relatively good sensor-support, the vast majority of devices deal with Java ME’s basic and heterogeneous sensor functionalities.

The Aware Context API (ACAPI) aims to bridge this gap by providing a framework for building context aware applications for mobile devices based on Java ME. In this article, I’d like to introduce ACAPI, its structure and usage briefly. Please feel free to comment.

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  • Mar 16 / 2009
  • 3
Distributed Systems, Programming

KadS: a secure version of the Kademlia protocol

There are various peer-to-peer protocols out there. All of them focus the decentralisation of storage and other system resources. Most implement a distributed hash table (DHT) to store information. That is, each node of the network only holds a small part of the hash table but is able to locate and retrieve any requested entry. Kademlia, a protocol designed by two NYU students in 2002, is one of them.

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