WAP adds a new dimension to the Internet - mobility. With a mobile phone or a handheld PC that supports WAP you can book tickets, order a pizza and check your bank account at any time. On the bus, on the beach, on the spot. The information is there when you need it. Search for news, weather forecasts and stock exchange rates if you want to be up-to-date. Play games, gamble and chat if you want entertainment.
But WAP is not only about making the Internet mobile. Services such as downloading entire phone books and new, WAP stands for Wireless Application Protocol. Itīs a global standard developed to make Internet services available for mobile users. Even though WAP is based on Internet technology, WAP and the Internet live side by side. A company or a person that has an Internet site can make the information available for mobile users by transforming the pages into WAP pages.
To access WAP services you need a WAP product such as Ericssonīs MC 218, R320 or R380. Besides the WAP compatibility, WAP products have a large full graphic display and include a micro browser.
Ericsson offers a complete WAP solution, ranging from handheld devices and WAP Gateways to tools for developing WAP sites. The WAP Gateway is a server that controls the communication between a mobile device and the server where a WAP service (or page) is stored. The WAP Gateway is as essential to WAP as WML, Wireless Markup Language. WML is a programming language designed to fit small, handheld devices used for wireless communication. Software developers use WML to create WAP pages. Ericssonīs WAP Ide is an excellent tool for creating WAP pages and allows you to see how your page will look like in a mobile phone or handheld PC.
improved ways of controlling outgoing and incoming calls will make mobile telephony even easier.
How does a WAP device connect to the internet
The normal implementation of a WAP scenario looks pretty much like this:
In the figure above, starting from the left, you'll find the mobile WAP device
attached to the mobile network (GSM, CDDA, etc) which dials the modem
attached to a dial-in server (RAS, or Remote Access Service). This server gives
the WAP device access to the protocols it needs. These are the same lower level
protocols as a normal Internet Service Provider will give you. This is known as
PPP or Point-to-Point Protocol.
These protocols are used to access the next step in the chain, the WAP gateway, in this figure hosted by the mobile operator. The WAP gateway is the link between the wireless and the "web" world, basically giving the WAP device access to the common internet.
Another way of explaining it, and in a bit more detail would be to say that when you type in the URL for a site on your WAP device, for instance http://wap.colorline.no/ the WAP device first checks if it already has an open connection, if not it dials up the PPP provider as described above. After the PPP provider has given the WAP device the required protocols and assigned it an IP address, the request for the URL is sent to the gateway. The WAP gateway, now under "control" of the WAP device requests the URL with a normal HTTP request, such as GET http://wap.colorline.no/. On the internet, there is a normal "web" server which in this case holds both WAP and "web" contents, which now receives the request to send out the contents located at the http://wap.colorline.no/ URL. Also note the normal "web" browser at the lower part of the figure. The web server, depending on which type of browser it is talking to (WAP or "web"), sends out WAP, represented by the blue line, or "web" content represented by the green line. Following the requested content back to the WAP device, the contents, if they are in so called textual WML code (the human readable type), the WAP gateway compiles the textual WML into so called tokenized WML, or WMLC, where basically the code is "compressed" down into binary data (the machine readable type). This tokenized WML is then passed back to the WAP device. If the contents from the web server is already in tokenized WML format, the WAP gateway skips this operation. The reason for the conversion from textual WML to tokenized WML is to reduce bandwidth usage. A WAP device's WML browser can only read tokenized WML.
Finally, back at the WAP device that requested the URL, the WML browser, when receiving the tokenized WML code renders the contents on the WAP device's display to present a card for the user. This is how the majority of WAP devices is connected to the internet, and if you're completely new to WAP, you might want to get back to the more complex configurations below a bit later.
When the WAP device is configured to use a public WAP gateway, and not one that is hosted by the mobile operator, we basically move the WAP gateway out on to the internet. I repeat that this is not the normal way WAP devices are configured, but during development you might come across this. The figure then looks something like this:
The WAP device now requests another WAP gateway, located on the internet.
There's really not much more to say about this configuration other than that this
is the typical configuration for developer who want to test a specific WAP
gateway, for people who either have a crap or no WAP gateway provided by their
mobile operator.
Now things start getting a bit more complicated...
If the content provider wants pretty much total control over the stream of data sent back and forth between the web server and the WAP device, they would install something called a WAP server. This device is merely a web server and a WAP gateway in one, and it is usually located inside a firewall on the content provider's networks. The configuration would look something like this:
(The firewall is of course optional, but highly recommended)
The WAP device gets internet access the same way as before, but from there it
now connects to the firewall which accepts or rejects the connection depending
on the firewall configuration. The firewall then passes the connection on to the
WAP gateway inside the WAP server. In this configuration, the chain between
the content server and the WAP device is point-to-point secured with the WTLS
encryption protocol.
I would also like to remind you that a WAP server is not needed for normal sites. A plain web server will do just fine, thank you very much :)
Can WAP devices use graphical images instead of just text? The WAP specifications allow for the use of a graphics format called WBMP. It is a 1 bit (either black or white) version of the BMP format. Consequently, all graphics must, in order to be compliant to the specifications, be converted into wbmp.
There are certain limitations that must be observed, when using WBMP. An image should not be larger than 150 x 150 pixels. Bear in mind that the WAP device screen is very limited. For instance the Nokia 7110 screen is 96 pixels (width) by 65 pixels (height), so 150 by 150 pixels would look enormous, and take up more than the entire creen. Furthermore, the size of the graphics cannot excede 1461 bytes, due to WAP phone memory limitations.
Not all WAP devices can display graphics. Consequently, the "alt" option in the img tag must be used, so that users of non-graphics WAP devices will be able to see an alternative textual representation instead of the graphics. WAP Tiger has a very simple command line tool to convert normal BMP files to WBMP
In some cases you might also want to display a WBMP image in a HTML environment. For this, Andre de Leiradella (leiradella@writeme.com) has produced a Java and C based application that will output a GIF image from WBMP input as it would look on a small LCD display. The C version can be run as a CGI.
What size screens will be developed
The WAP device display varies a lot. Some support graphics, some only text.
Just to give you some examples, Mitsubishi's yet unreleased WAP capable
phone has a 3 line, 12 character display. Nokia's 7110 has a screen resolution of
96 (width) by 65 (height) pixels. Although images can be slightly larger, the
maxiumum display area for images is 95 (width) by 45 (height) pixels. The pixels
on the 7110 are also slightly taller than they are wide. The ratio is aprox. 1.25
times higher than wider. Ie. a square would look like a rectangle 1.25 times taller
than wider. The same goes for circles, which would have a slight oval shape.
How can I send e-mail from a WAP device?
In the HTML world, there's a simple way to trigger the default e-mail editor by
using mailto:. At present there is no such thing in WML, and e-mails must be
entered through a WML form.
Tarique Sani has released a completely brilliant POP client for WAP devices
under GPL, called WAPpop, and this is available for download at SANIsoft's site.
WAPpop uses PHP and mySQL, which both come preinstalled on most Linux
distributions.
In the code above you'll notice the reference to http://some.host/mailhandler.
This is a CGI, a server side script of some sort that will handle the input from the
mail form and transform it into an e-mail message and send it. There are virtually
thousands of such scripts available in all sorts of script languages.
If you plan to use a similar form for sending mail, you will most likely have to edit
the variable names. Also note that there's a limit to the amount of data that can
be sent from your WAP device to the server. Long messages will most likely
break.
To demonstrate how it works, the following PHP script could be used to handle
mail from the form. It will format a WML deck with a card that tells the user if the
mail was sent or not. For real life applications, you should add checks for things
like well formatted e-mail addresses etc.
Are Cookies supported in the WAP environment?
Normal HTTP Cookies ARE to some extent supported in the WAP environment.
It doesn't matter what you've heard before. Cookie support is getting better.
The first time you view the card, the counter should read 0 (zero). All caching has
been turned off, and to support even the poorest of the WML browsers, the card
forces a reload of itself by adding a random variable to the URL. (I do not
recommend this method of forcing a reload). When you click on the Increase
Counter link, the deck will reload, and the card should reappear with the counter
increased to 1 (one) and so on.
The Cookie name in the script is called TestCookie, and it has a very long life
span, so if you return to the script several days later, the counter should read the
number you last saw - ie. not 0 (zero). This only applies if you return with the
same type of environment that you last visited the script with. If you somehow
clear your locally stored cookie data, the counter will again start at 0 (zero).
If the counter reads 0 (zero) over and over again, a cookie is not passed to the
web server. The script also attempts to check if a cookie was passed and will tell
you this.
In addition, the script also displays the HTTP header string HTTP_VIA and
HTTP_USER_AGENT which should give you some indication as to which
gateway make and model you are using. Some gateways identifies themselves
via HTTP_VIA and some via HTTP_USER_AGENT and some gateways are
made by programmers that just couldn't be bothered.
The code for the test script is available below. This is PHP code, but a standard
PHP setcookie() function equivalent will exist in most popular script languages,
and that's pretty much the only special thing with the script. The function simply
sets the cookie, and the PHP variable $HTTP_COOKIE_VARS is used to read
the cookie.
WHAT IS I-MODE.
Using mobile telephones to access the internet - everything from checking e-
mail, to making bank balance inquiries and looking for the latest in trendy
restaurants - is all the rage in Japan.
NTT DoCoMo, the country's leading cellular phone operator, has taken Japan by
storm with i-Mode, its mobile phone service which offers continuous internet
access. Launched in February last year, it now has about 3.5m subscribers, with
the number expected to reach 5m this year.
The huge success of i-Mode has also enabled DoCoMo to lead the way ahead of
the world's telecommunications giants in offering wireless data services.
DoCoMo has created a network of partners which offer specially formatted
websites to fit into the small screen on the mobile handset. The service boasts
311 websites linked to its portal page, and 4,362 "unofficial" web pages created
by private individuals.
One of the keys to i-Mode's popularity is the Japanese love of the mobile phone.
Japan's internet boom has been slow to take off, partly due to the low penetration
of personal computers. Only about 3m to 4m people use personal PCs, while
cellular phone users total 49m, making Japan the world's second-largest mobile
phone market.
The simplicity of using i-Mode in accessing the internet is also fuelling the current
boom. Keiichi Enoki, leader of the i-Mode team project, says: "It's totally different
from setting up your notebook PC and then going on the internet for about an
hour. When you have five or 10 minutes to spare, you can just take out your
mobile phone and check the news or the stock price or your e-mail."
Mr Enoki knew the needs of i-Mode's potential market - young Japanese in their
teens and 20s who have grown up with digital gadgets. "I saw my children
playing their television games and using their beepers and messaging each
other." Indeed, 50 per cent of i-Mode's users are in their 20s, with subscribers in
their teens and 30s comprising another 30 per cent. "There aren't that many
middle-aged users," he laughs.
How is iMode different from WAP?
The difference between iMode and WAP is first of all that iMode uses another
markup language. For WAP, the markup language is WML (Wireless Markup
Language) while iMode uses CHTML (Compact HTML). Not to be confused with
"Chunks of HTML", a phrase related to generating dynamic HTML content.
Compact HTML has an advantage over WML in that a large majority of WML
developers come from the "web" world where they are used to HTML. Compact
HTML is a subset of HTML 2.0, 3.2 and 4.0. However, the future of internet
content serving is XML, and from XML the step to WML is hardly noticable. It's
much more noticable with Compact HTML or HTML.
iMode with its markup language similar to HTML is NOT the WAP killer the media
has been waiting for. To be honest both technologies are in their infancy, and
would do well to learn from eachother.
You can read a lot more about Compact HTML here.
iMode browsers support images in the GIF format. This is likely to change as the
rest of the "web" world is turning away from the format due to patent problems.
Compact HTML does not support the following
? JPEG images
? Tables
? Image maps
? Multiple character fonts and styles
? Background image
? Frames
? Style sheets
? INPUT buffers larger than 512 bytes
? SELECT buffers larger than 4096 bytes
iMode also has a very different set of protocols, but reliable information on this is
not yet available. I'd rather not base this on rumours. Stay tuned.
Difference between laptop and wap.
Long live the laptop
Internet-enabled mobile telephones do not spell the death of the laptop, by
Michael Dempsey
The laptop computer started life as a machine that manufacturers chose to call a
portable PC. Just how portable it was depended on the strength of the user, with
the early machines of the mid-1980s being heaved about in a bulky case.
Subsequently, the laptop evolved and lost weight, and the term "notebook" was
coined. But other devices started to steal the notebook's glory.
Psion, the British computer company, worked at reducing the size and weight of
its family of personal organisers until the market looked good enough for
competitors. A host of hardware companies seized on Microsoft's cutdown
version of the Windows operating system, known as CE, to launch small
handheld computers, know as personal digital assistants (PDAs).
Where are the laptop computer and personal digital assistant going in a world full
of small devices for which the user has a strong personal attachment?
According to Jonathan Powell, UK product manager for notebooks at Dell, while
Wap will give the mobile phone a massive new potential, the laptop will survive in
a very separate environment where a large screen and significant processing
power makes sense. "Notebooks are used by those people who really need to
browse across the internet," he says. "Web pages will soon be constructed in a
different way for Wap phones and small devices."
Dell sees the growth of the telephony network as another key factor. More people
will use laptops in conjunction with a mobile phone, says Mr Powell.
Concepts of future phones unveiled by Ericsson show the mobile growing and
acquiring a colour screen (see opposite). This development is no danger to the
laptop, says Mr Powell. "It will put pressure on PDAs, rather than PCs," he says.
Claire Ruskin of Cambridge Consulting, an engineering design company that
works with telecoms and IT manufacturers, agrees. "People want the full
functionality of the software they get on a PC . . . and they want a
communications device. So the PDA will be squeezed between the mobile phone
and the PC," she says.
Psion has responded with a new range of machines that are larger than its
traditional Psion Organiser series. Characterised by the company as "sub-
notebooks", these machines are for users who want to access e-mail but do not
need all the functions of a PC. But these machines sell for about L800,
dangerously close to the pricing of low-end PCs.
While there is enough demand to keep Dell and others producing large numbers
of laptop PCs, the emergence of internet-enabled phones is a threat to those
PDAs that cannot forge a distinct identity.
NET V/S WAP.
Mobile internet is the hottest area of new technology. It will take off more quickly
than the internet ever did. One main difference is that whereas the internet was
started by academics and scientists, the force behind mobile internet access is
the cash-rich mobile phone industry. Mobile network operators are looking for
new ways of making money from existing subscribers. They also need to find out
whether people really will use data on the move. Meanwhile, mobile phone makers need a reason for people to replace their
phones. Mobile internet provides this reason because customers need phones
with bigger screens. The drive from operators and service providers will mean
that new services are provided quickly - and promoted strongly.
Another difference between the early growth of the net and mobile internet is that
there is already a lot of internet-based content from which to draw. This can be
adapted for display on mobiles in a number of ways. A website can be viewed
using a phone that is Wap-enabled. The website will also need to display data in
a Wap format. Internet services can also be accessed on ordinary handsets
using SMS, which enables mobile users to send each other short text messages
displayed on the recipient's screen. A third way of connecting to the internet from
a mobile is provided by voice browsers, where you use your voice to surf the net.
Some analysts believe that within three years more people will be accessing the
internet from mobile phones than from office or home computers. One reason is
that phones accompany users more or less wherever they go - computers do not.
But the internet for mobile devices will look very different to the one we are used
to now. Jerry Glover, commercial director of Yahoo! Europe, which has a joint
venture to provide content for Siemens handsets in Germany, says "ease-of-use
is the number one priority for mobile internet services." For example, one of the
options on the Siemens Wap phone screen will be the Yahoo! service. And to
receive it, the user will simply use the arrow keys on the handset, and click "OK"
for a connection to the site. Some industry leaders have, however, expressed
doubt as to whether people really want to access the net on the move at the
speeds available with today's mobile technology.
There are also websites that work well over the internet that are unlikely to be a
big hit via a mobile. The sites that succeed in this new environment are likely to
be those which address the needs people have when travelling and those which
don't have too many graphics or have the graphics cut out.
None the less, one device will not be suitable for all mobile internet activities.
Margaret Rice-Jones, managing director of Psion, sees "an internet-centric future
where people use a mixture of devices to connect to the net, depending on
where they are going, how long for, and what they need to do."
For e-mail they might use a personal organiser with built-in communications, but
for documents, they'll use a portable computer, and for phoning and rescheduling
flights, a mobile phone. Despite the momentum behind mobile internet, it looks
as though executives will be packing that overnight bag full of gadgets for a few
years yet.
NEED TO BE MOBILE.
The newly-forged acronym Wap has come to signify the convergence of the two
fastest growing technological phenomena of recent years: the internet and
mobile telephony. Wap - or wireless application protocol - is simply an enabling
technology, a set of rules for transforming internet information so that it can be
displayed on the necessarily small screen of a mobile telephone or other portable
device. At the moment, however, it is the key to mobile information, mobile commerce
and a broad range of internet services which can be delivered over the airwaves.
It is the essential link between the internet on the desktop and the increasing
capabilities of mobile phones, personal organisers and other wireless devices.
With the emergence within the next few years of next generation mobile phones -
which will make possible the delivery of full-motion video images and high-fidelity
sound over mobile networks - the technical significance of Wap may decline:
mobile commerce and other forms of mobile interaction with the internet,
however, will continue to grow in importance.
Many experts believe that m-commerce will prove to be the "killer application"
that will drive growth in the mobile sector after the market for conventional voice
calls has been saturated - a phenomenon that is likely within a few years in
developed countries.
M-commerce is emerging more rapidly in Europe and in Asia, where mobile
services are relatively advanced, than in the US where mobile telephony has only
just begun to take off. With the advent of next generation services, however, it is
likely that the US will have closed the gap within the next few years. What will
consumers do with m-commerce? Everything from buying goods and services to
downloading music and books and asking for stock quotes and geographic
information. Online banking is a typical application. According to some estimates,
the growth of mobile commerce will outstrip electronic commerce, nascent
though that is, within three years.
By 2004, there could be more than 700m mobile commerce users. All the major
telecoms manufacturers - with the world leaders Nokia of Finland, Motorola of the
US and Ericsson of Sweden in the vanguard - are gearing up for this expected
boom and have introduced or are about to introduce handsets with Wap
capabilities.
These new handsets will need to have special capabilities. Using a Wap phone
involves more than "cutting through the cord" as Ericsson observes. The content
providers will know where their users are geographically and will be able to direct
them to specific destinations - restaurants or theatres, for example. They will be
able to carry out secure transactions. And, most important, because of the small
screen, the information they display will be tailored to their users' specific
requirements. So the leading operators, including the world's largest mobile
telephone group, Vodafone AirTouch, are doing deals with content providers to
ensure they have a rich menu of goods and services to offer consumers in the
new m-world. This guide, the second of a series in which the FT examines ideas
in business, looks at three stages in the development of mobile commerce. First,
today's primitive but promising wireless services. Second, the emergence of
transmission technologies which will make these services a practical proposition.
And third, the advent of next generation services ushering in the new era of
mobile business.
Wap is one of a number of curiously named new technologies that will underpin
the convergence of mobile communications and the internet. Bluetooth, for
example, a radio technology capable of connecting mobile phones with personal
computers. Or general packet radio service (GPRS), which will deliver internet
information to mobile phones many times faster than conventional GSM
technology. Most experts believe that the introduction of GPRS later this year will
be the turning point for mobile commerce. Early Wap services, for example BT
Cellnet's Genie, delivered over GSM using short message service (SMS)
technology, are too slow and cumbersome to be practical.
GPRS, however, will provide something close to the service which can be
expected from next generation phones. It will make possible an "always on"
service because it only uses the network when there is information to be sent. It
will make the difference between a technical novelty and a service which will
have customers saying to themselves: "I would really like to use this."
The evidence from Japan, in any case, is that customers are more than ready for
m-commerce. NTT DoCoMo's recently launched i-Mode, a data communications
service rather like Wap, has already signed up several million customers and is
still growing rapidly.
How do I access WML pages?
The easiest way to access WML pages, or cards, is to go through an existing
gateway. Most cellular providers will have this functionality on their WAP home
page which you access through the WAP device. The gateway link is commonly
called "Go to URL". When selected, the WAP device will access the URL you
specify through normal IP via the gateway. In this case, it is the gateway that
reads the WML contents for you and passes it on to your WAP device. The
contents are ready the same way a PC based browser reads them.
Some operators have chosen not to allow their users access to other sites than
their own. This could be compared to an Internet Service Provider only allowing
its users access to the ISP's own sites. Such a policy shows a clear lack of
brains, and any such operator will find that customers will go elsewhere.
If you're stuck with such an operator, it is possible to get around this by
connecting to the internet via a local ISP's dial up service and use a public
gatewat to access WAP resources. An e-mail explaining the error to the operator
in question could probably also help.
Can I "surf" WAP sites without using a real WAP device?
Yes, WML contents can be read by any micro browser or User Agent. The best
way of reading WML content would probably be to use one of the many WAP
device emulators available, because the contents are written for real WAP
devices, but these are heavy applications and some of the require installation of
additional components such as Java Runtime.
Ninad S
SE-TEC
