Wireless Application Protocol Support in IntraWeb 7.0

Overview

Along with HTML 4.0, HTML 3.2 (for PDA devices), WAP covers 95% of the computers and devices that exist on the market, making deployment easy for developers and virtually eliminating all deployment barriers.

Currently WAP comes in two versions. Although WAP 2.0 is the emerging and current standard, there are numerous devices still on the market that only provide support for version WAP 1.x. Due to this fact, IntraWeb  provides support for both 1.x and 2.0 versions of WAP.

WAP 1.0 is based on WML (Wireless Mark-up Language) and offers very limited possibilities to developers. In particular, visual presentation is reduced to black and white small screens and object positioning is at most lacking. With WAP 1.2, colour screens were introduced (supported) along with PUSH technology and support for cookies.

WAP 2.0 introduces many new enhancements, one of the most important being improved visual representation. With the introduction to support with CSS, object positioning becomes again something as simple as it is currently with web pages represented in browsers. WAP 2.0 uses XHTML MP, which is a superset of XHTML Basic (subset of XHTML 1.1). XHTML Mobile Profile is the new standard for WAP development, and IntraWeb 7.0 provides full support for this as well as for WML.

How does it work?

IntraWeb contains a component-base targeted directly at WAP development: TIWControlWAP. Similar in concept to TIWControl and TIWControl32, all WAP enabled controls descend directly from this base control and are placed on TIWFormWAP forms. The difference between a WAP control and other controls in IntraWeb is that with WAP the developer can specify WHAT language is used to produce output at runtime, that is, either WML or XHTML MP is returned. Clearly, one of the main advantages of this is that, not only can the application support both WAP 1.x and WAP 2.0 devices, but the produced language/output can be decided at runtime based on device recognition.

When a device makes a request to IntraWeb via a WAP gateway, IntraWeb will return the relevant information to the system, which includes among other things, the version of WAP the device supports, the screen size, whether the device is black and white or supports colours, and if so, how many colours it supports, etc. This will give the developer full control on how to produce the output for a particular device.