Locating friends and family using mobile phones with global positioning system (GPS)

This paper presents a mobile application based on providing location based services (LBS) using Global Positioning System (GPS) as a location provider. The main objective of this work is to design and implement a client server system that helps users to locate their family members and receive alerts when friends are nearby. The mobile application was implemented using J2ME where the most recent APIs and other older APIs were combined together in order to make the application reliable on all types of mobiles. The server was implemented using PHP since PHP guarantees that the server would not be overloaded. The type of the database used in the system was MySQL. The average location accuracy of the application is about couple of meters.