The WAP is the acronym for the "Wireless Application Protocol." The WAP is an de-facto industry-wide specification which covers applications that operate over wireless networks, with particular emphasis on applications for mobile phones. The standard is maintained by the WAP Forum, an organisation formed in late 1997 at that stage comprising representatives from Ericsson, Mtorola, Nokia and Unwired Planet. Since them it has been increased to over 100 members, including all of the main players in the Internet, communications, information technology and e-commerce fields. A full list of members is available on the WAP Forum site.

The initial WAP-enabled devices have to work on low bandwidth systems (on GSM these go at a maximum of 9.6kb, whereas even the modems built into standard PCs can - at least theoretically - operate at 56kb/s). Because of this, WML has been designed with features which allow one to cut down the amount of bytes sent.

This is a brief introduction to some basic WML markup and techniques to enable you to build a basic mobile site. It's handy to have access to a WAP enabled mobile phone or an emulator (links available here).

The UP.Link platform supports a multipart MIME format, called a digest, which allows you to send one or more entities--that is, WML decks and the other content types listed in Valid Content Types--in a single message to the UP.Link Server. This enables you to optimize use of the wireless network and make your service's user interface appear more responsive to the user.

The following sections provide guidelines for structuring your navigational model.

When a user switches from card to card in a deck, we need to store data in variables. WML variables are case sensitive.

A WML card can be set up to let a user enter information, as demonstrated in this example:

The largest deck or digest you can send to a phone in a single response is approximately 1200 bytes (including the WML tags). If you have display text that takes up more than 1200 bytes, use multiple cards in separate WML decks. Define a element with type="ACCEPT" and label="More" that allows the user to proceed from one card to the next.

WAP Technology

The following sections provide guidelines for using the <input> element to constrain the text a user can enter.

The previous chapter described how to test a static WML deck on a local file system. It is also useful to test the deck on your Web server to make sure it is properly configured for WML.

Technical Introduction to Wireless Application Development

WML card can be set up to display the anchor functions of WML.

Building Dynamic WAP Applications with ColdFusion

The certificate that a WML service must provide when it sends notifications is called a "server certificate" by most Certificate Authorities.

This manual provides instructions for using the Openwave Software Development Kit (UP.SDK) to build WML services for the UP.LinkTM platform. These instructions assume familiarity with the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) protocol, HyperText Markup Language (HTML), and programming languages, such as C and Perl.

Wireless Messaging Systems

Developing Oracle Wireless Applications

The UP.Simulator has two modes for accessing WML services:

Introduction WAP, WML & WMLScript