Serving WAP Pages? 16
kfs27 asks: "One of my professor with some of his Java students would like to get into handheld devices and WAP interfaces. They want to first start with building pages which can be viewed on a WAP enabled device. How does one go about serving these pages. Is there a specific WAP webserver or are there modules to Apache? What are the choices and any other suggestions you may have regarding WAP programming."
Try Cocoon (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Try Cocoon (Score:2)
cocoon performance... (Score:1)
i tried both cocoon 1.8 and cocoon2 out on my tomcat 3.2.1 at work (java jdk1.3.1) and i got REALLY horrid performance from cocoon2. it sucked what life was left in my NT box. what kicked ass were the chock full o samples that cocoon2 has, and also the ease with which it installed. MUCH easier to install than cocoon1. cocoon1 has you converting your whole tomcat over to a cocoon enabled server, while cocoon2 is a simple drop in
anyone else have the same issues with performance on cocoon2 ? or was it just some funky situation i ran into on my box?
MIME Types and HTTP issues (Score:5, Interesting)
application/vnd.wap.wmlc wmlc
application/vnd.wap.wmlscriptc wmlsc
image/vnd.wap.wbmp wbmp
text/vnd.wap.wml wml
text/vnd.wap.wmlscript wmls
WAP sites are generally regular HTTP servers. The end-user's device contacts a gateway which then makes an HTTP request, compiles the data if it hasn't been already, and sends the compacted version on to the device.
So it is actually possible to serve static WAP content using nothing more than the base Apache distribution and some added MIME types.
read about wap first (Score:2, Informative)
the phones get their wml pages off of any normal http server via a proxy (wap gateway).
Just use Apache... (Score:1)
There's no difference between WML pages and HTML pages other than the MIME type that is used and the format in which they're written. Hence Apache can be used to serve them.
If, on the other hand, you wish to make a dialin gateway that WAP devices can talk to, you'll need something like Kannel [kannel.org].
Re:easy (Score:2)
I can't say that I disagree -- ASCII rules. But in case you actually meant to point out a few tags that we could use, try typing < for <, and > for >.
The Perl Journal had an article... (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.samag.com/documents/s=1131/sam05040004
which outlines useful perl modules, how to configure apache to play well with wml, and sample code for wireless appilcations.
Apache + PHP tutorial for WAP (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/mike20010118.
not sure why you'd bother (Score:1)
1) go to openwave and download the simulator
2) then just use whatever web server and scripting pages you want - asp, jsp, php, whatever, just make sure your headers output that it is a wml page and then it will render just dandily on a WAP device.
speaking from experience, I ported an entire asp site over to a wap device (not so hard if you write the site with functionality classes and display classes - then you can just add a wap display class and use the logic to pass either to that or the html pages based on what the client is).
I just got a new assignment today that looks like I will now likely get the job of porting our newest software over so that it outputs via an xsl translation (of xml - duh) out to wml - which I think is silly since WAP is dead - but it will be easy enough to either add to this module, or replace it with whatever G3 tech comes popular soon enough.