What Is WAP Access?
WAP is an acronym for Wireless Access Protocol, an open, global standard for providing Internet access for device digital devices, such as cellular phones. WAP access involves communication between a device device and a protocol gateway, which translates requests from WAP into the protocols -- known as Hypertext Transfer Protocol and Transmission Control Protocol over Internet Protocol -- used on the World Wide Web.
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History
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The WAP standard was developed by the WAP Forum -- a consortium of manufacturers, service, content and applications providers, including Ericsson, Motorola and Nokia, formed in 1997 -- in an effort to unify previous, fragmented efforts at creating and application framework and protocols for mobile devices. The objectives of the WAP Forum included the creation of a wireless protocol specification that allowed interoperability between differing wireless networking technologies and enable content and applications to be scaled over a range of networks and devices.
WML
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WAP access is based on Internet technology, but is optimized for wireless devices. Web pages written in Hypertext Markup Language -- the standard protocol for formatting and displaying documents on the World Wide Web -- are typically unsuitable for small device devices because of their limited display, computing and storage capabilities, so WAP uses another protocol, known as Wireless Markup Language, instead. WML is compliant with Extensible Markup Language -- another markup language used on the Web -- and so allows application developers to use existing tools.
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Interface
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WAP-enabled device devices typically include a user interface in the form of a microbrowser -- also known as a mobile browser, or mini-browser -- which may be a miniaturized version of a standard Web browser, or an independent product in its own right. The limited set of functions that WML provides makes it possible to design browsers that require very little computing power and read-only memory. Furthermore, WML pages can also be encoded in binary format to reduce the amount of data held in random access memory and transmitted over the wireless interface.
WAP Proxy
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WAP access relies on the presence of a WAP proxy -- a proxy is a process that accepts requests from some service as passes them to the real server -- to connect between the wired and wireless worlds. The WAP proxy intercepts requests from mobile devices, interprets them and forwards them to the appropriate HTTP server on the network. Similarly, when the WAP proxy receives a response from the HTTP server, it converts the data into a form that can be processed and displayed on the mobile device using WAP.
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References
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