Chapter 10. Wireless Applications
Cellular phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and various other forms of wireless devices are taking the world by storm, opening new avenues for development as well as a whole host of challenges for developers. These devices are tiny compared to PCs, both in terms of physical size and processing power. This means that traditional HTML web pages are unacceptable, opening the door for new markup languages based on XML to take center stage.
This chapter introduces key concepts behind wireless technologies with particular emphasis on Wireless Markup Language (WML), a concise alternative to HTML that is custom made for wireless devices. The role of XSLT and servlets will also be explored though an example application that allows wireless users to browse movie theaters and showtimes.
Wireless Technologies
The family of technologies used by wireless devices is in its infancy, just a few years old. Because of this, there are a few competing markup languages in use today. In Japan, the i-mode protocol is the market leader. i-mode is defined by a company named NTT DoCoMo, utilizing a subset of HTML known as Compact HTML (cHTML). This markup language shares much of the same syntax as HTML but is essentially proprietary and is not based on XML.
In Europe and the United States, Wireless Access Protocol (WAP) is more popular. WAP currently utilizes WML, which is quite different from HTML and cHTML. In coming years, it is likely that most vendors will ...