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Toolkit Available For WAP programming
mge writes: "According to this story in some local Aussie IT pages, Nokia is looking for developers to make online games for mobile phones and it has established R&D centres in Helsinki, Belgrade and Sydney to provide content for the company's new mobile entertainment centre. There's a WAP Client Toolkit, Game Construction Toolkit, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), documentation and sample source code for applications to download. An Australian company, Fluffy Spider Technologies, is also offering assistance to game developers. They have posted free code online for a simple Tic Tac Toe game. Of course, they want games, but how about automated dial-ins (to take advantage of lower call/ISP rates), smart forms etc ... " Well someone needs to start giving all our smart phones something to think about, eh?
Sorry, but to incite developers to use WAP it takes more than a free dev. kit, I think.
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Actually, what will incite developers to use WAP is the existence of phones and gateways that support it!
The people who decide whether this happens are not geeks reading Slashdot, it is the big wireless carriers who have invested huge amounts of money in their networks. Why do they choose WAP? Quite simply there is no other set of protocols that more adequately addresses the issues involved in deploying applications over the wireless networks they have spent all their money on.
http://www.freeprotocols.org/wapTrap/WapShortPate
WAP is simply not an open standard. We already have a technology for such applications, whjich is proven, open and runs pretty well : HTTP.
HTTP is not analagous to WAP. WAP is more like TCP/IP + HTTP + HTTPS + HTML + a browser operating environment + Javascript, but all designed in such a way that it can run over all the disparate kinds of networks that exist in the world today. In fact, WAP does use HTTP, but that is just a small part of the picture.
As for WAP not being an open standard -- there are real efforts being made to make WAP and internet standards converge (e.g. both WML -> XHTML and HTML -> XHTML).
This will happen at about the same pace as it takes the wireless carriers to convert their networks into beasts that look a lot more like the internet at large (similar bandwidth, IP based, etc.).
Well, it isn't completely new, it's a dialect of XML.
My prediction is that we are going to Moore's Law WAP to death in short order ("I'd like 'The Patently Obvious' for $400, Alex")
The limiting factors for WAP devices by and large aren't processor power, so Moore's law doesn't apply. The two major factors are screen size and network speed.
The only guideline I know for network speed is Neilsen's Law, which is significantly slower than Moore's, and that only covers Internet bandwidth, not Wireless bandwidth. And screen size is fixed. If you don't think that calls for a different UI, try posting to /. off a cell phone.
*'castle with flying bats' card pack not included.
Let it be known that I have no arguments against Asteroids or Missle Command. I would accept that.
"It's the little touches that make a future solid enough to be destroyed" --William S. Bourroughs
As someone who has implemented a medium-scale WAP application, I have only one thing to say: WAP sucks.
:/
The fact that its based on XML is cool, the syntax is clear, the addition of a scripting language is fairly sensible, and yet I have many gripes:
Motorola and Nokia have implemented their browsers completely differently, you simply cannot write a simple WAP application that will perform well and be userfriendly on both, you have to do it twice, once for each browser basically.
Additionally, the WAP markup itself is full of redundencies, there are invariably several ways to achieve each effect. This would be fine except that each browser implementation treats them differently, causing something that is easily navigable in one browser to be a total mess in another.
This on top of the already obvious flaws such as over-zealous caching despite headers, terrible error handling, buggy simulators (Nokia in particular) and confusingly unintuitive choices for various aspects make WAP at its current stage impractical to develop in with anything short of a Motorola and Nokia phone right in front of you to test with.
I note however that if you can get your hands on a couple of phones to test with, things become easier, and with a bit of wire sniffing and using a decent backend language like PHP, you can whip up WAP applications fairly quickly. Its just not a small-time developers game at this stage
You can't win a fight.
I've been trying to read a bit about WAP at the WAP forum and the W3C but the whole thing strikes me as semi-interim and only half heartedly standard and open.
My basic complaint is the premise. On the one hand we see a whole new type of device with legions of people trying to figure out how to make efficient GUIs while conserving either display space, or storage, or whatnot with WAP ...and on the other hand we have multi-zillion dollar companies building infrastructure and vastly powerful processors, that will render the need for "efficiency" as irrelevant as my 2gb hard drive.
My prediction is that we are going to Moore's Law WAP to death in short order ("I'd like 'The Patently Obvious' for $400, Alex")