Distributed Systems – Mobile Application

There are many technical options to build a mobile application. Kivy has been selected for this architecture. Here are some of the reasons why.

There is a Java Mobile Edition, but it is old and doesn’t run on a lot of mobile devices.
Some very popular mobile technologies are Java based, like Android Studio. But to emulators have certain hardware requirements that some students might not have. So, they would not be able to run their programs.
Kivy is Python based and can run on older PCs.

Install Kivy

First you need to install Python, Make sure that python is in your path and you have pip installed when you install Python.

Then run the following commands.

python -m pip install –upgrade pip setuptools virtualenv

python -m virtualenv kivy_venv

python -m pip install “kivy[base]” kivy_examples

Here is a demo of the installation.

Final Architecture

Before we build the mobile application, let’s look how it will fit into our architecture.

Building the Mobile Application

Here is the code for the mobile application. The video explains the code and gives a demo.

If you would like the code for this, you can find it at the following link. It is a zip file with .py file inside.

Here is a demo of the mobile application calling the Web Service.

Final Demo of Application

Here is a final demo of all of the parts working together.