Abstract
Recent surveys have revealed an exponential increase of
subscribers to wireless services. The benefits that provide
wireless technologies are wide and varied: access to live
features, information consultation or even instant opinions
expression. In the domain of mobile interaction, a particular
aspect attracts attention of many professional companies:
the e-voting.
This report describes the design, the development and evaluation
of a WAP based voting system prototype that allows people
at any place to vote on certain topics from their hand-held
PC or mobile phone.
The prototype is capable to retrieve vote topics, different
options, process the register of ballots and display vote
results on a graphical interface with attractive graphs. The
prototype provides a full customisation of the system's behaviour
for any vote topics.
These facilities are provided by the convergence of Internet
technologies with the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP).
To achieve this prototype package, the interaction and delivery
of dynamic content was implemented using Microsoft's Active
Server Pages Technologies (ASP). The core of the system consists
of a Microsoft's Access Database system and the graphical
interface produced using a Charts Java Applet.
The current system has been developed in relation with JustPhone
Limited, a Scottish company that provides such wireless voting
service for sports events. They felt a real market potential
to adapt their dependent Delphi system to an open system using
ASP and Access package.
The features of the WAP voting prototype work but during
a scalability evaluation, it appeared that an important restriction
has been noticed concerning the possible number of concurrent
connections to the system. The interfaces using ASP and Java
Applet have satisfied all the requirements.
In addition to the development of the prototype, several
ideas are proposed as future directions of work towards an
amelioration of the efficiency and accuracy of the prototype
concerning the votes storage.
The resulting system prototype is already available by any
mobile device at the following address:
http://www.bertrand-colas.com/honours-project/wap
Initial Project Specification
The objective of the project is to produce a WAP-based voting
system
which will allow attendees at an activity such as a conference,
sports match or even at a lecture, to vote on certain options
from their hand-held PC, or mobile phone. A good example would
be at a sports match where the crowd could vote for the man-of-the-match.
The main requirement, at the present, is to produce a prototype
of the system, which would then be expanded into full product
development. The initial application is for a sport match
voting system for a man-of-the-match award.
Technology:
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ASP with an SQL interface to an Access database.
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IIS Version 3.0 or later (as this supports WML to be
able to create a WAP server).
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Access database would contains tables for players names,
and the option to vote for the man-of-the-match.
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WAP would interface to the database and register votes.
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WAP would also allow the system to clear the votes
for players, to delete players from the database, and
so on.
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The result would show a WWW page with graphs of the
votes for each player.
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The best solution would be to use components to allow simple
ASP calls to the database (as the component would covert simple
ASP calls into SQL queries), but it is possible to implement
the whole system in ASP.
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