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Practical WAP

Chris Bennett
Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, UK, 2001
424 pages, paperback ISBN 0-521 00561-2
Reviewed by Mike Mosher
mosher@svsu.edu
Saginaw Valley State University,
Michigan USA 48710

This book should prove of use to software-developing artists, a few of whom have been investigating the mobile phone as an art medium. As Patrick Lichty's exhibit "(re)distributions: PDA/IA/Nomadic Art as Cultural Intervention" and accompanying website http://voyd.com/ia/demonstrates, screen limitations can be an amplifying funnel for creativity. Artists and designers are forced to return to the essentials, graphic limitations unseen since the days of the early Macintosh.

The Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) is a standard championed by the WAP Forum (the industry groupworks to establish a global standard for this protocol) ntended to unite disparate developers and service providers. WAP solves protocol mismatch for internet support, and helps mobile devices to be Web clients, as well as providing other kinds of usability. It has incorporated extended hyptertext markup language (XHTML) and can be used to develop screen interfaces from a phone's 3 lines of text with 12 characters a line to VGA color screens.

What will spur the development of the WAP standard? The entire project is dependent on an infrastructure of 3G wireless networks, and the continued development and spread of mobile devices. This hand-held hardware will have limited RAM and ROM, small screens, fewer keys, one finger navigation (a standard maintained by Ericsson/Motorola, Nokia, and Phone.com since 1997), location bound global positioning satellite (GPS) information. Besides being portable, they will always be on--this last point still under debate--in each and every product.

There is the big question of whether the WAP application should run on a thick or thin client? Thin clients today include SMA (popular in Europe, 160 channels, no images), HDML, MS Mobile Explorer, Palm web clipping. Thick, with a complete application or client installed on the device, currently include proprietary systems like those little tablets carried by UPSdeliverypeople, plus those designed for mobile brokerages, tickets and reservations.

One can can develop a WAP application with a text editor and CGI scripting language like Perl, but there is emerging a variety of development tools. Among these tools are software development kits (SDKs) available with debuggers, integrated development environments (IDEs), HTML to WAP converters, and the windows-based WAP emulator from M3Gate. Bitmap-creation tools are available from imagemagick.org, terflops.com, plus a Photoshop plug in from rcp.co.uk. All are ready to contribute to the herculean task of converting existing HTML-based Web services to WAP.

The author forsees future use of WAP to promulgat4e M-commerce, the spread of VoiceXML (which the author sees a logical step for phones), multimedia applications, including streaming video, through use of the synchronized multimedia integration language (SMIL) whose development proceeds with the blessing of the World Wide Web consortium www.w3.org/audiovideo. MP3s will soon stream over WAP networks, as well as color graphics. In the tradition of complex games like the Sims for the Palm, developers are providing small single-player games for WAP, but when will we see networked ones?

The book provides the basics of Wireless Markup Language (WML) and WMLscript WML 1.3 reference in book. Source code in the book is also available on its website. It recommends WAP for development of Push applications, so controversial on the Web for its bandwith-hogging five years ago. Technical information is provided. The WAP development standard is listed and charted, its layers comparable to those that make up the Web. A WAP request is followed and explained through each step. It admirably covers design factors, the tough questions including security and authentication, provides case studies, and includes some essential and well-written chapters on usability and testing. The reader is given a useful glossary and index. One in xxxxxx's Breakthroughs...series, _Practical WAP_ is a good book for a programmer undertaking a WAP application, allowing her or him to ask the right questions, define the problems and issues at hand. It is welcome book for an artist-programmer, artist collaborating with a WAP programmers, or one simply wishing to learn about this platform.

Meanwhile this reviewer believes fortunes will be made on this platform by designers of applications who figure out algorithms for parsing Websites, programs that make graphic decisions with sufficient intelligence for boiling down eight-bit color graphics to one, three or four-bit versions. Imagine if there had never been a Photoshop, and all Web graphics were created in old school s mid-1980s MacPaint (or, at best, sixteen-color PC Paint) and you get the idea. I look forward to a bubbling galaxy of downloadable conceptual artworks, terse literary _feuilletons_, hypertext aphorisms, bitmapped sketches and cartoons, all fast, immediate and succinct. In the art of WAP content development, the future shall belong to the Zen-like, punchy and simple.

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