We present an experiment relative to the use of Bluetooth wireless technology to provide network support for midlet applications accessing Web Services. We refer to the most common architecture used to invoke Web Services, where a client and a server exchange SOAP messages using HTTP as the transport protocol. To the best of our knowledge, there is no implemented support for executing a HTTP POST operation over a Bluetooth channel. Therefore, to guarantee the independence of the application from the type of communication channel used, in this paper, we deal with the problem of designing a framework allowing a Java application programmer to directly interface Web Services from a mobile device using a Bluetooth connection.

This paper presents a proof of concept of how Bluetooth technology can be used to design, develop, and deploy Web Services-based applications. According to our experiments, programming interfaces like Blue Cove and kSOAP, despite being still under development, are mature enough to be used as the underlying technologies for Web Services invocation over Bluetooth in a real world application.