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WAP - Environment

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The uppermost layer in the WAP stack, the Wireless Application Environment (WAE) provides an environment that enables a wide range of applications to be used on wireless devices. In the chapter "WAP - the wireless service enabler" the WAP WAE programming model was introduced. This chapter will focus on the various components of WAE:

Hardware and Software Requirement:

At minimum, developing WAP applications requires a web server and a WAP simulator. Using simulator software while developing a WAP application is convenient as all the required software can be installed on the development PC.

Although software simulators are good in their own right, no WAP application should go into production without testing it with actual hardware. The following list gives a quick overview of the necessary hardware and software to test and develop WAP applications:

Microsoft IIS or Apache on Windows or Linux can be used as the web server and Nokia WAP Toolkit version 2.0 as the WAP simulator.

Please have look at WAP - Useful Resources to find out all the above components.

Configure Web Server for WAP:

In the WAP architecture, the web server communicates with the WAP gateway, accepting HTTP requests and returning WML code to the gateway. The HTTP protocol mandates that each reply must include something called a Multi-Purpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) type.

In normal web applications, this MIME type is set to text/html, designating normal HTML code. Images, on the other hand, could be specified as image/gif or image/jpeg, for instance. With this content type specification, the web browser knows the data type that the web server returns.

In WAP applications a new set of MIME types must be used, as shown in the following table:

File typeMIME type
WML (.wml)text/vnd.wap.wml
WMLScript (.wmls)text/vmd.wap.wmlscript
WBMP (.wbmp)image/vnd.wap.wbmp

In dynamic applications, the MIME type must be set on the fly, whereas in static WAP applications the web server must be configured appropriately.

For more information about configuring MIME types for your web server, please consult your web server documentation.


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