I'm a final year Computer Science student and now working on my project. I want to work on an application development, an sms-based actually. I want to help my General Studies department develop a result checker application which can be received via sms, for example, a student can send their admission number to certain short code numbers say 34055 and the sms application will return the student's result back to their mobile phone.

The idea is that I want to replace the normal online result checker system and introduce an sms-based one considering the fact that out of every 10 students, 9 of them own a mobile phone.

Now I want fellow Nairalanders to give me ideas on what and what technology I need to develop this kind app. I'd also like to know if there's anything like signing of contract with network providers to assign this short code to me, in fact I need all necessary details regarding this issue.

Thanks.

You will surely need to register with a network company to get the short code

GSM PHONE -> JAVA APP (RECEIVE INFO) -> CONNECT TO DATABASE -> GET RESULT -> JAVA APP (SEND INFO) -> GSM PHONE

Java app can be any application program written in phone's language not necessarily Java. So you need to narrow down to which phone or interface you want to use the rest are secondary issues.

No need for shortcode.
Choose a friendly mobile phone OS like windows mobile or android.

On windows phone, you can use message-Interceptor to catch all incoming sms messages and submit them to your web page url, then use php or other serverside scripts to process the submission on your web page.

I did exactly what you need on Afrisoft SMS Server
and it is being used on www.longcode247.com and a couple of other sms-to-web portals.

lojik:

No need for shortcode.
Choose a friendly mobile phone OS like windows mobile or android.

On windows phone, you can use message-Interceptor to catch all incoming sms messages and submit them to your web page url, then use php or other serverside scripts to process the submission on your web page.

Thanks bro., you are a genius.

Can you elaborate more on the message-Interceptor thing on an android phone,
and, I guess you pay normal service charges for sending to url.

Yes, lojiks idea makes sense. You simply need a front end which you can easily put together using JQuery mobile or JQTouch, and then you can easily code up a service in the back to talks to the front and also the back data store( I am guessing you will get the data directly from the school db or some source in real time).

lojik:

No need for shortcode.
Choose a friendly mobile phone OS like windows mobile or android.

On windows phone, you can use message-Interceptor to catch all incoming sms messages and submit them to your web page url, then use php or other serverside scripts to process the submission on your web page.

I did exactly what you need on Afrisoft SMS Server
and it is being used on www.longcode247.com and a couple of other sms-to-web portals.

Good idea. That's a very simple and straightforward way to do it.
For Symbian, Nokia usually has a connectivity SDK that you can download from their site, depending on the phone type you want to use.

For industrial SMS developments, however, you would be connecting to a live SMS Center (SMS-C) in a network, or an SMS aggregator. They typically support the SMPP (Short message peer-to-peer) protocol, implemented as a set of methods. Java has support for SMPP protocol in the JDK, and for the Microsoft coders, there are ActiveX components you can use. You can do both short codes and long numbers this way, with no need to connect a phone physically to your application server.

Sounds like kannel can help you (www.kannel.org)

The main use for Kannel is to link HTTP based services to various SMS centers using obscure protocols. The good thing is that it's free. You will need some Unix/Linux skills to set it up though but once installed correctly, it's pretty neat.

Mr leke oji. Do u ave an sms app for symbian phones

can you build a site for me like www.longcode247.com

I need to do an SMS site. Can anyone help me with more information?

imagine a device as small as cigarette pack running of 4 aa batteries with all the results stored on a memory card and connected to a tc35 modem. a simple avr or pic receives the student code, searches for the result and only replies if found. no need for fire walls or expensive pcs. any hardware programmer can build this.