WAP stands for Wireless Application Protocol, it's an open global specification defining a standard for communicating Internet information such as internet pages and e-mails to portable wireless devices like mobile phones and other wireless terminals. It was developed by the WAP Forum which is an industry association comprising nowadays over 500 members, the first founders were the four big companies: Nokia, Ericsson, Motorola, and Unwired Planet (UP) (this last one changed its name to Phone.com and after that it merged with Software.com to become Openwave). |
Because of the impossibility for the handheld devices to communicate directly with the servers on the Internet due to the differencies between the wireless and the internet data bearers and also due to the bandwidth and the other limitations of these devices, it was necessary to create a different approach to transfer data to them which is not the same one used on the normal Internet. So a mobile phone for example using WAP protocols should send its request to a WAP gateway, this one could be owned by a wireless network provider and it acts on behalf of the mobile phone to send a normal HTTP request to the server where the data needed reside because of its postion somewhere at the edge of the internet, and from the server, the data take the reverse way to the demander. After this short explanation of the WAP world, we can start now talking about what interest us more which is the language to use in WAP applications, it is the Wireless Markup Language: WML. |