Introduction

PART is a light-weight Java library for building distributed applications, with a specific focus on handheld and embedded devices. PART has been developed within the IPerG research project, funded under the European Commission's IST Programme, where it has been used to build pervasive games.

On the lowest level, PART provides a peer-to-peer communications framework that allows connected devices to communicate via an event based mechanism. PART supports arbitrary connection topologies, ad-hoc establishment of communications groups as well as the parallel use of many types of protocols, e.g., TCP and Bluetooth.

PART also provides a concept of shared objects. Such objects can be used to represent application state and may be replicated and synchronised between the set of running processes. Various discovery mechanisms allow processes to find and retrieve shared objects held by remote processes.                      

PART has been tested on the following platforms:

• Windows and Linux based PCs (Java 1.4, 5 and 6) 
• Sony Ericsson K700, K750i, W800i, K800i mobile phones (PART requires J2ME MIDP2)
• The TINI microcontroller from Maxim Integrated Products
• The SNAP platform from Imsys Technologies