Operations Overview
The most frequently used operations are conversion operations. Most of our clients use one of the following workflows:
- Maintain initial database of ringing tones. When a client requests a tone, the service determines the type of the client's device (application-specific feature). Depending on the type, a tone is converted into an appropriate format and probably some tone processing also takes place (both are the features of Ringtone Creator) and sent to to the client's device. This approach is called “Lazy Conversion”.
- Convert all the ringtones in the database into all possible formats at once (the feature of Ringtone Creator). When a clients requests any tone, he/she receives a tone from the converted database. This approach is called “Eager Conversion”.
What exactly is a conversion operation? Imagine that you have a collection of ringtones in some format, say, IMelody. Your big idea is to convert all of them into some other format, say, Nokia Smart Messaging(this format is used by Nokia phones for representation of monophonic ringtones). Let's assume that all of these tones are located in the same folder. Then the task can be split into two:
- Browse the folder and read each IMelody file
- Convert each file into the Nokia Smart Message format and save it somewhere else
Obviously, the first goal is easily achieved using classes from the
java.io package. The second task is even easier: load a ringtone (one line) and save it in another format (one line). Bingo!
