Web Servers To Handle Java Servlets And WAP?

Yousef asks: "We're trying to develop a WAP enabled Webserver, that can work with Java (Servlets). Currently the only working option is M$ IIS running the New Atlanta plugin. Now I'd rather NOT run IIS, so if anyone else has a solution to this, it would be much appreciated. We've tried Inprise IAS and Apache JServ (We're deploying to a Sun Solaris box). Any help would be nice. Getting the servlets to run is quite easy -- The problem is getting them to work with WAP!"

"WAP creates its own session ids, and that stops other serverside objects from sharing the same objects.

In short, we have an existing Servlet based system. Now we are trying to incorporate WAP into it (WML). It seems to us as though WML passes cookies around differently to HTML: HTML stores them with the browser, and WML stores them on the server. We've tried just about every server under the sun, and they all behave in the same way."

Comments

WML can work anywhere..

[Thomas Charron]

I'm confused. Nearly anything that can serve HTML can serve up WML, provided the content type is configured correctly, and it spits out valid WML. Why would one need a specific API set to spit out WML code?

XML + XSLT = WAP

[marvinx]

Have you considered developing your web site around XML? There are two very good products out there (both open source) that enable the XML+XSLT=XHTML/WAP/PDF/whatever paradigm.

I don't know the particulars of your application, but by decoupling the content from the presentation, you gain an enormous amount of flexibility and power.

By creating content as XML, you can now create XSLT scripts to transform that pure content into an arbitrary presentation form. So you can write an XSLT script that transforms your XML content into XHTML or into WAP. This is powerful because now you can serve multiple different requestors with the same content.

There is a project called Cocoon (from the Apache Software Foundation) that does this exact thing. Cocoon itself is a servlet, so it gives you a choice of what servlet engine to run it on. It provides good caching, XSLT transformations, and even a "sitemap", which is a central location for binding look&feels to content.

There is an open source servlet engine that has built in XSLT processing, XPath processing, and XML parsing. It is extremely fast and has a lot of features. It is Resin. I recommend this one. Because this is a full blown servlet engine, you have JSP processing, session support, and it is even a small web server.

Enhydra

[chadfowler]

http://www.enhydra.org Has a servlet engine (built around tomcat) with an Apache/ISS/Netscape based load balancer. Built-in support for WML via an extension to their GPL'd XMLC technology.

Re:Excuse my ignorance, but...

[Black0ut]

WAP and WML are things that allow webpages to be seen over portable conncections like web enabled cell phones and PalmPilots...From what little i have read about it, it takes the HTML and strips thing like img tags and such and parses it into a form portable devices can understand

xml.apache.org

[Kingpin]

You should definitly check out the Cocoon project. XML, XSL/T and whatever you might need.