Introduction

As technology changes, so do the tools that we use to manipulate it. Today the Internet is available from a number of devices, both connected and portable.

WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) is a specification from the WAP Forum that determines the standards and protocols that can be used to transfer data across wireless devices including cell phones, PDA's, and portable computers. The WAP Forum is an industry-wide consortium, which aims to define how applications should operate within the Wireless domain.

At the time of writing, WAP version 2.0 has just become a standard, so I thought that this article would be a great idea to show those of you who've never played around with WAP just what it can do and how easy it is to create WAP compatible content using WML, ASP or PHP.

In this article we will look at using the free OpenWave SDK to test some WML and WMLScript using a WAP emulator. We will also look at how to configure both IIS and Apache web servers so that they are capable of sending WML documents to any WAP compatible device that requests them.

To test the samples in this article, you should download and install the OpenWave SDK for Windows. You should also have either one/both of the following setup:

A Windows 2000 server running IIS
A Windows 2000/Linux/Unix server running Apache
[Note] This article will not focus on teaching you WML directly, but rather it will show you the steps you need to take to implement and test WML scripts using a web server and WAP emulator. There are several links at the end of the article if you're interested in learning WMLScript in its entirety. [End Note]

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