CRONTAB for mobiles

Question

Hi there,

I was just wondering, but some one might have already thought off!

Is it possible to built a crontab type application for mobile phones (for Java enabled phones)? I am thinking of an application, which, does checks at scheduled timings and on certain cases acts without manual intervention.

Have any one built such an application or have idea? Links and pointers will help. Or such an application is already there for Windows phones?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I'm not a Windows Mobile specialist but to build somehting like this using JavaME, you would need:

• autostart the application after it is installed and when the phone reboots.
• keep it in the background. Have a GUI only when the user is managing the cron jobs.
• have the application signed so well that it doesnt require the user to manually accept permission requests that would probably pop up when running jobs.
• limit the range of possible jobs to match the JavaMe API restrictions.

If you're targetting Windows Mobile, I figure C# is probably better integrated with the phone operating system so all those things would be easier to do.

Answer 2

I too didn't find any such thing for Windows Mobile (Pocket PC), and so decided to write my own. Check out PocketCRON.

Answer 3

It is possible to write a crontab-like service for the BlackBerry. Indeed, you should be able to pull off a similar service on any device which supports background tasks, of which BlackBerry is one.

On a mobile platform, however, the issue isn't so much as to whether you can get a crontab-like service to work, the issue is what is that crontab task going to do once it runs on its schedule? Mobile platforms, even those that allow background tasks so you can implement a crontab-like facility, aren't very open when it comes to your process accessing other processes, especially system-owned processes.

So, while, yes, you can implement a crontab on some mobile platforms, the actions performed by the scheduled task would be limited; probably to actions within a small set of allowed/open system facilities.

You can find more information about programming for the RIM BlackBerry line of devices (they do allow background processing), from the following page:

http://na.blackberry.com/eng/developers/