9781861004048: Professional Wap

Synopsis

The Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) provides a universal open standard for bringing Internet content and advanced services to mobile phones and other wireless devices. Designed from the start to take account of the limitations of today's devices - small screen, low power and low bandwidth - WAP is the platform for the new generation of "media phones".

Professional WAP gives a broad overview of WAP and associated technologies - what it is, why it's useful and how to take the best advantage of it. It covers the WAP architecture and protocols, what WAP tools and servers are available for developers today and how to WAP-enable your web server. Practical examples will show you how to make content and services available over WAP using WML Decks and WMLScript. More advanced topics include administration, transactions, security, and integration of telephony with internet services (WTA).

The book is principally aimed at web developers who are experienced in HTML, scripting, probably some server-side technology, and who now want to find out how to apply their skills in the WAP world. It will also appeal to project managers, application architects or other professionals who want to gain an understanding of WAP technologies and how businesses could benefit from them.

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Review

Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) and its related technologies are emerging as the standard way of creating network-wise software for wireless computing devices, such as mobile telephones. Wrox Press's crack team of programmer-writers have put together a winner in Professional WAP. To a greater extent than any other WAP book on the market, this volume shows its readers how to do real work by using WAP, Wireless Markup Language (WML), WMLScript, and various toolkits and servers that ease wireless application development. Best of all, the authors realize that most folks working as WAP developers have Web roots; they explain their subjects in terms that anyone with a bit of HTML and Web-scripting (JavaScript or VBScript) background should be able to follow easily.

Aside from the overview sections that explain WAP technologies in broad terms, this book focuses on code. Readers see software literally "develop" through the course of each chapter, as the authors start out with a relatively simple illustration and build on it, adding features and demonstrating capabilities as they go along. Generally high-grade commentary accompanies the evolving code, so this book proves almost as useful away from the development workstation as at it. Overall, the book earns its price with its in-depth coverage of such important, firm standards as WMLScript, supplemented by less detailed--but still useful--attention to such ancillary technologies as VoiceXML. --David Wall

Topics covered: Development of software for mobile telephones and other portable devices with Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), Wireless Markup Language (WML), WMLScript, Active Server Pages (ASP), ColdFusion, Java, and other languages and technologies. Task-oriented sections deal with the specifics of working with e-mail in WAP applications, integration of WAP with Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), and content pushing.

From the Publisher

2000 is the year of the wireless web. The advent of a technology that allows us to access Internet content and services via mobile phone is revolutionizing the way we think about computing. WAP is the first step along this road, and with the advantages that m-commerce and 24-7 accessibility can bring, developers will need to get to grips with this new technology in order to stay one step ahead.

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