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If you visit Indonesia you may meet barechested men wearing skirts who have never used a personal computer but nonetheless are holding a cell phone to the ear. These phones, and a cornucopia of other hand-held devices, are coming online on the Internet right now and in the next few years. As the authors note in Chapter 5:
It is tempting to consider wireless connectivity to be simply "copper in the air" and expect that the computing assumptions traditionally made about connection methods and application usage will hold true. It is also easy to assume that existing applications will migrate to the mobile Internet world without significant change. Unfortunately, both of these assumptions are rarely valid.The eight authors who collaborated on The Wireless Application Protocol are technical principals for a variety of significant wireless ventures, including Nokia, SBC, and IBM Pervasive Computing. In the five sections of the book:
I. Introducing the Mobile Internetthey take you through the wireless world from one end to the other, describing the devices, examining the users and their needs, exploring the technology starting a little above the radioelectronic details and working upward through the entire protocol stack, while teaching the languages, techniques, and tricks and traps of providing services to these hand-held devices. Incidentally, in the course of this odyssey you learn WAP, WML (the HTML protocol partner), and WMLScript (the WAP equivalent of JavaScript).
II WAP: The Mobile Internet Standard
III. Implementing WAP Services
IV. Advanced WAP
V. Where Next?
Appendices on development tools, resources, a WML reference and a WMLScript reference, user agent profiles and acronyms, and a bibliography and index complete this very professional and broadly encompassing work. The Wireless Application Protocol is not, however, a beginner's book. You must bring to the table familiarity with TCP/IP, HTTP, XML and programming languages, preferably JavaScript.
It's interesting that the rich and tightly presented techno-nerd content of the book really doesn't start until the fifth chapter. The first four chapters are about the human and usage factors: what these devices are, why people want to use them, why corporations are interested as customers in facilitating the rapid development and deployment of the wireless milieu, what devices exist and what devices may be expected to exist, and how the end users feel about these devices, down to the colors and personalization factors of hand-helds.
If you are an experienced software development professional hoping to ride the hand-held Internet wave following the PC Internet wave, or if you are a highly technical manager who will be managing such developers, you probably can't do better than The Wireless Application Protocol for a complete introduction to writing applications for the mobile Internet.
-- Jack J. Woehr (jwoehr@attglobal.net)
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Explanation of ERCB rating scale:
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