Designing and developing a location-based mobile tourism application by using cloud-based platform

This paper describes the design and development of a location-based mobile tourism application for cultural tourism in Malaysia by using a cloud-based platform. The architecture consists of three levels, front-end, middle-ware, and a back-end level that is built on Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud platform. The front-end level is a location-based mobile tourism application for Apple mobile devices, to explore nearby cultural tourism places. The middle-ware level provides a Web service to generate eXtensible Markup Language (XML) output from the relational database to exchange data between the mobile application and servers in the cloud. Finally, the back-end level that is built on AWS cloud platform provides services such as Apache Web server on Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2), MySQL database server on Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), and a cloud storage that uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), giving flexible, auto scalable, and secure servers to provide required services. The application is also caching images on the local storage and storing some data in SQLite database on the mobile device itself to provide some offline activities, and also decrease the number of sending requests to the servers, in order to save some data traffic.