What is WAP exactly? WAP stands for Wireless Application Protocol. As the Internet becomes an important part of our lives, it is natural that people would like to have access anywhere, anytime. Wireless media will be the perfect means to accomplish the anywhere, anytime idea. As always, anything "talking" over a network needs a protocol, the rules of communications. WAP is the latest effort that the computer industry is trying to push forward. In short, WAP will enable any small wireless devices to talk to a gateway of their wireless network, and in turn connect to the Internet world.
The easiest way to understand WAP is to relate it to the Web. Let see, Web uses TCP/IP as its transport media, and WAB uses WPD. On the security level, Web has SSL, and WAP has WTLS. Everyone familiar with http in Web. In WAP, WSP is the counterpart. Finally, we all love html. It is everywhere, as you are actually reading one. In the WAP world, it has WML. WML is the content level markup language. In addition, we probably have used JavaScript or VB Script when creating web pages. Think about it, scripting really provides html interaction with readers. WAP has also adopted this technology. Scripting language for WAP has been defined as WMLScript. Well, think about it, WAP is not a stranger after all. All the familiar concepts are rolled in the wireless world.
One might ask that why do we need WAP, if we already have all this stuff running for the Internet. The most important reason is that current technologies are not suitable for wireless network. If you have ever got upset with your slow Internet connection (who hasn't??), then you can imagine what it would be to browse the Web on your cellphone. WAP is designed with one major consideration in mind, low bandwidth. We can go into the technologies in detail in future articles, but just to give you an idea. Web connection is slow, because every time you request a html page, a new TCP connection has to be setup. After a request is serviced, a connection is closed down. This process is being done over an over again. With WAP, it is designed to handle connection session for months. Therefore, a user session is setup one time, and reused over a long period of time.
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