Over-the-air provisioning (OTA)

Server Configuration

An application can be installed in a midp device over the air. The jad and jar files must be made available on a publicly accessible server. Instructions for acheiving this vary from device to device but typically involve connection via GPRS or WAP to the jad file or to html or wml file containing a URL to one or more jad files.

Note the URLs linking JAD to JAR and HTML to JAD may need to be absolute.

Mime Types

When the web server serves the jad and jar files to the client (mobile device), the correct mime type must be specified. Failure to set this up correctly will cause the mobile device to indicate an error such as "File type unknown".

On Apache, the mime types are configured or referenced from the conf/httpd.conf file.

For example in Apache 2.0.48 for linux, the httpd.conf file contains the following line which configues apache to look at a common mime types file:-

TypesConfig /etc/mime.types

No further configuration is necessary IF this file contains the following two entries:-

Where the above entries do not exist, the following AddType directives should be included in the httpd.conf file. Note this is better than changing the system mime.types file which may in the future be overwritten if the operating system is upgraded or changed.

AddType text/vnd.sun.j2me.app-descriptor .jad
AddType application/java-archive .jar