PPS Payment Application on Android

Abstract

PPS, the only platform provide payment service for hundreds types of bill. Users can pay their mobile service bills, credit card bills and even the rental. However, this convenient platform does not provide a generic solution on android solution on Android OS. What they can provide is a web based application, just like a form on the web page grabs users’ input. So, the decided idea this project is supporting the PPS payment on a “real” Android application platform, not using web page as the interface, but use Java coding to build the interface. In java coding, it is available for developers to access both software and hardware components of an Android smartphone, like phonebook, message book, camera. With access those hardware and software, it will convenient the payment process under users’ prospective. For example, with using camera, BillKiller is able to capture the information like bill number to replace the user input. With accessing the message book, BillKiller is able to register bill number instead of asking users to copy code from messages. With the benefits of smartphone, this project is going to convenient users in the billing process. The initial target of this project is supporting PPS users to pay bills in Billkiller, with a snapshot on the bill, Billkiller will capture all information automatically. After BillKiller got those payment details, it will send those information to PPShk server to proceed the payment process. The ideal design also supports users to register the bill number with importing the security code automatically. Last but not least, the ideal design also planned to support all types of bill, like electricity charge bills, water supply charge bills. The finalized design of BillKiller contains two parts, Android programming and web programming. The Android programming, as the name, is all about building android activities on Java. Not only building the interface for user input, in my plan, it is required to deal with the camera and access the personal information of the android phone. However, this part is flexible in the project because it is not the core part of BillKiller. Once less functions implemented in this part, for example supporting less types of payment, it will not affect the functionality of the whole project. Under a tight schedule, BillKiller may support few types of bill, it is targeted to support all credit card bills at this moment. For web programming, it is the difficult but also the important part in this project. Network sniffers will be a technology to be used for the web programming part, to analysis the network packet and communicate with the PPS server. Since BillKiller is not an official application, it should be designed based on the existing content provided by PPS, especially for the communication to PPS server. There are only one communication provided by PPS server, for all smartphone applications and the web pages, is the HTTP GET POST method. So, in order to communicate with the server, BillKiller was designed to act as a web browser, analysis and reply the server with HTML syntax.