First time with WAP

There are first times for everything and this is no different. I have never in my life programmed in WAP. I am finally to a point in my career that I need to start learning how to develop in this technology because it's only going to be getting bigger.

Background is 6 years in professional PHP development and am the Director of Web Development for a marketing firm based in New Florence, PA. I personally have an application based in PHP/MySQL that I am looking to port the XHTML over to WAP.

I was wondering where you all learned how program in WAP and what you typically use to develop. Wondering if there is any IDE's out there for this type of programming. I have completed a few google searches on WAP but would rather get it from the source on what is the best sites to learn from. Not how to do the newest hottest thing, but just the basics and we will go from there.

Thank you all and look forward to doing some reading,
Chad

Basic wap - w3schools
Basic xhtml mp - Developers home
Best practices - w3c
Tips - Openwave
Creating content - O'Reilly
general reading - http://www.cameronmoll.com/archives/000577.html
Basic wap & wml integrated - tutorialized (a bit outdated, but if you are in the know with PHP, shouldn't be an issue)


As for development kits, you can get free SDKs from the nokia website. Some web browsers can imitate a wap browser too, Opera and Firefox for example. Those browsers can also do SSR (small screen rendering), that enables you to see what your site would look like on a small screen.

Hope that starts you on your way.

Jabba thanks for the info.

How hard to you guys think this is : I want to have my users log into their account with their email and password. Then they will be able to see the latest posts in their area. These posts will come from a PHP script that is fed by a mySQL database. I am just making sure this can be done before I start.

I will start my journey of reading and understanding tomorrow. Thank you so much!

Chad R. Smith

Of course it can be done. There are a few wap forums scripts already out there.
The hardest thing about the whole thing, coupled with the idiosyncrasies of each individual phone, is the fact that the the final outputted code needs to be perfect or you have 99% + chance of the page not displaying at all.

Dear Jamie,

I am also v.new to WAP.

My problem is also that i want to display results from PHP/Mysql so as you said its possible, great.

Can i install any (if availble) wap webserver to test my wml/php/mysql scripts/queries on windows machine, for php i am running on apache webserver?? please provide any link.

2ndly please also provide link to the Free nokia development kit, as i wasn't able to find.

Regards

You do not necessarily need a wap server for this. If you use PHP you can force headers to fit the wap mime types /tweak your server config accordingly. I run Apache on windows at home, unix hosted, and I dont have any problem serving wap pages. I haven't done anything out of the ordinary with set-up of the server, only use PHP headers to ensure the content type is correct.

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