designing reusable applications is vital area of research. design patterns are an innovative notion that promotes reusability. this thesis attempts to develop generic and reusable short messaging systems that can be used by the academia environment using the notion of design patterns. in this thesis the design and implementation of the two essential parts of any short messaging system is carefully investigated and compared to the relevant traditional approaches. both the short messaging service center (smsc) and the mobile station (ms) have been fully implemented as generic units based on selected design patterns. in chapter 2, we investigated possible developing platforms to house the smsc. different servers were also discussed. ideally, the developing platform should not limit the choice of server. jsp was used to develop the smsc application because it was found to operate properly on any server. the second part of chapter 2 discussed three possible implementations of the smsc application. the first uses a simple architecture of only one jsp page. the second realizes that true generality is only achieved through the use design patterns and it implements the smsc application with the aide of the model, view and controller (mvc) design pattern. the third implementation tries to enforce this crucial design pattern through struts, which is based around the mvc design pattern. chapter 3 includes three stages that were used to develop a smsc application for sending and receiving sms messages. the first stage included a crude smsc application that lacked all structure. it placed all of the business logic with the presentation logic, thus, making the page hard to read. the second stage proposed separating the business logic and presentation logic with a design pattern. the mvc design pattern was used and a lot of structure was gained. now that we have this great design pattern aiding the architecture of the smsc application we needed a way to enforce it. in the third implementation we used struts, which automatically applies and enforces the mvc design pattern. in chapter 4, we explained the architecture of a ms. we also outline the necessary steps for a mobile device to send and receive sms messages. j2me is introduced as the preferred developing platform for a ms application. this chapter also introduces two ms applications for sending and receiving sms messages. the first sms application was developed by sun microsystems and is easily deployable. however, it didn’t have a design pattern so the second sms application proposed two design patterns that will serve the architecture some structure. the two design patterns were the mvc and the wizard dialog. finally, in chapter 5, conclusion and future research trends are discussed.