Professional WAP Book

This book is subtitled: With WML, WMLScript, ASP, JSP, XML, XLST, WTA , Push and VoiceMail--so you know straight away WAP is just the start of the solution. In fact, as this book is published, neither WTA nor Push works. The authors start with a long panegyric to the wonders of WAP before discussing stack models and other arcana--knowledge of which, quite bluntly, will do little to aid you in developing WAP applications. WAP development requires development software, including WAP phone (or other device) emulators. Unfortunately, in such a new and fast moving area this was out of date before they finished writing it. This is followed by a discussion on WAP gateways. The section on building and installing WapIT's Kannel WAP gateway under Linux is welcome and there's coverage of the trial version of Nokia's software under WinNT. You're then into application development with WML and WMLScript. Perhaps the funniest example here is the development of a car-buying application. Do the authors really believe anyone would ever buy a car via a text based WAP app on their mobile phone? Bizarre. While the technology examples using ASP, Perl and so on with WML show how to code such apps there is a frightening lack of realism in the examples. Have you ever tried writing an e-mail on a WAP phone? This is not realistic. In fact, the whole book is about to be overtaken by events as WAP 2.0 is released with the lessons learned from the more successful Japanese i-Mode incorporated within it. If you have to work with WAP today, buy this--you won't find anything more comprehensive. But if you just want to get up to speed on yet another new digital technology wait for the inevitable second version incorporating WAP 2.0. This will address many of the current usage and programmatic issues currently making WAP more joke than hope. --Steve Patient Read More