Amazon.co.uk
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 Unfortunately, in such a new and fast moving area this was out of date before they finished writing it.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
Amazon.com
Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) and its related technologies are emerging as the standard way of creating network-wise software for wireless computing devices, such as mobile telephones. Wrox Press's crack team of programmer-writers have put together a winner in
Professional WAP. To a greater extent than any other WAP book on the market, this volume shows its readers how to do real work by using WAP, Wireless Markup Language (WML), WMLScript, and various toolkits and servers that ease wireless application development. Best of all, the authors realize that most folks working as WAP developers have Web roots; they explain their subjects in terms that anyone with a bit of HTML and Web-scripting (JavaScript or VBScript) background should be able to follow easily.
Aside from the overview sections that explain WAP technologies in broad terms, this book focuses on code. Readers see software literally "develop" through the course of each chapter, as the authors start out with a relatively simple illustration and build on it, adding features and demonstrating capabilities as they go along. Generally high-grade commentary accompanies the evolving code, so this book proves almost as useful away from the development workstation as at it. Overall, the book earns its price with its in-depth coverage of such important, firm standards as WMLScript, supplemented by less detailed--but still useful--attention to such ancillary technologies as VoiceXML. --David Wall
Topics covered: Development of software for mobile telephones and other portable devices with Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), Wireless Markup Language (WML), WMLScript, Active Server Pages (ASP), ColdFusion, Java, and other languages and technologies. Task-oriented sections deal with the specifics of working with e-mail in WAP applications, integration of WAP with Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), and content pushing.
