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Wireless
Application Protocol (WAP) Applications :
Overview
Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) is a set
of protocols that allow for the development of Internet and
Web-based services for mobile phones and other mobile devices.
The WAP standard was developed by the WAP Forum whose founding
members include Ericsson, Motorola, Nokia and Phone.com and
addresses the limitations of mobile networks (low bandwidth,
high latency, and unpredictable availability and stability)
and mobile devices (limited CPU, memory, and battery life,
and a simple user interface). The WAP Forum has developed
their standards in such a way that they leverage and compliment
existing industry standards as much as possible. The WAP standard
specifies two essential elements of wireless communication:
an end-to-end application protocol and an application environment,
the Wireless Application Environment (WAE), based on a browser.
There are a number of
products currently available that implement the end-to-end
application protocol for WAP. These products, called WAP Gateways,
form the connection between clients on the mobile network
and applications hosted on application servers on the Internet.
The WAP Gateway builds a bridge between the telecommunication
and computer networks by routing requests from mobile clients
to the application servers. It can be physically located in
either network, though it is needed in only one of them.
This document discusses
how to provide content that is suitable for WAE and how to
configure and use WebLogic Server with a WAP Gateway. For
general information on WAP technologies see Additional resources.
Wireless Application Environment
(WAE)
WAE defines the framework
for network-neutral, wireless applications for narrow-band
devices. Two of the main components of WAE are Wireless Markup
Language (WML) and WMLScript (WMLS).
Wireless
Markup Language (WML)
WML is analogous to HTML
for HTTP applications. It is an XML-based language that is
specifically designed to interface with the micro-browsers
that exist in WAP-enabled devices. The Wireless Markup Language
Specification defines the tags and structure of a WML document.
A WML document is a collection
of one or more cards. Each card is considered a well defined
unit of interaction. The general rule of thumb is that a card
carries enough information to fit in one screen of a mobile
device. One or more cards can be logically grouped into a
deck of cards. See Generating WML for information on ways
to serve WML documents to mobile clients. For general information
on WML, see Additional resources.
WMLScript
(WMLS)
WMLScript provides general
scripting capability to the WAP architecture. It is designed
to overcome the limitations of narrowband communication and
mobile clients. While many of the services that can be used
with small mobile clients can be implemented with WML, the
human behavioral compatibility of scripting improves the standard
browsing and presentation facilities of WML. WMLScript resides
in .wmls files that can be made available to mobile clients
by placing them into the document root. The document root
is the root directory for files that are publicly available
on WebLogic Server. For more information, see Setting up a
document root. For general information on WMLScript, refer
to Additional resources.
Generating
WML
Requests from mobile
clients are routed through the WAP Gateway to WebLogic Server
in the form of HTTP requests. As described in Setting up WebLogic
Server as an HTTP server, WebLogic server can respond to HTTP
request by serving static files or HTTP Servlets written as
Java Servlets or JavaServer Pages (JSP). For WAP applications,
static files will typically be WML files while servlets and
JSPs will be used to generated WML dynamically.
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