WAP Gateway ???

What do i need the WAP Gateway for?
So far i simply used Apache configured to send an apropriate mime(content) type header with all .wml documents (or specified the Content-type in dynamic documents)and it worked fine.
am i missing something important?

i dunno as far as i know i use..

<!DOCTYPE wml PUBLIC "-//WAPFORUM//DTD WML 1.1//EN" "http://www.wapforum.org/DTD/wml_1.1.xml">

and that works just fine i only do it because its in my wap editor though.

You, as a wml content developer probably do not need a gateway, however, there does need to be a gateway somewhere between your site and real wap devices. This is because real wap devices only accept wmlc which is the compiled version of wml. In practise, the gateway is usually sat with the ISP. IE the teleco provides this so u don't need one. Make sense?

Again, if you are using an emulator on the PC, you might not see the relevance of the Gateway...as the emulator does the job of the Gateway as well as that of the user agent(handheld device). As Mikecounsell suggested, you need a gateway to sit between your web server and your user agent...to translate the agent's WAP requests into HTTP requests, and send it to the HTTP server, which in turn will send HTTP responses which the gateway converts into WAP responses and passes them on to the user agent. In some cases, they also provide cookie support!

Preetham

So what if my isp doesnt have a wap gateway? is there anyway i can set one up? where can i get one and how much??

As far as I understand the WAP Gateway piece would sit on the WAP device ISP's network and translate any requested HTTP/wml content from the internet to WAP/wmlc and send it to the WAP device. I've been developing for wireless users for about 6 months, and served it from an Apache server and never had to wory about a WAP Gateway. I have two WAP devices (not emulators) and that's how I test my applications. I just point my WAP to the URL and the rest is seamless. Any comments?

As a content provider you need not worry about the Gateway, that's correct. WAP Gateway is to a mobile user, as an ISP is to a home user. So Sprint, or ATT, etc. ought to be the WAP Gateway to their subscribers.
As for the WMLC issue, this is really quite interesting, and important!
Because mobile devices are lightweight and hence have small batteries, they do not carry enough energy to power a decent microprocessor. Hence they can NOT perform the usual "error correction/interpretation" that your standard browser uses when presenting an HTML document. I'm sure you realize that very few HTML documents out there really adhere to the W3C's standards. When it comes to WML, however, adhering to the standard is an absolute MUST. If there's even the slightest error in your code, it will never reach the mobile client.
Unfortunately, the WAP emulators available for your PC/Mac generally don't implement the full WML standard correctly. So you really need to test your stuff using an actual WAP device (which will automatically guarantee that you're going through a Gateway, btw).
Also, because of small screen size, keep everything super streamlined and emphasize a logical layout. But I'm sure you're aware of this already.
WMLC is the tokenized version of WML. Basically the WAP Gateway reads your WML document, parses it, validates it, converts it to WMLC (WMLC uses a much simpler "syntax", it just looks like a stream of numbers and letters) and then sends this to the WAP device. Phew. WMLC is like a set of instructions to the WAP device -- it has specific tokens to identify each valid WML element (<card> , <deck>, etc.).
Check out some WAP site (WAPFORUM.org, I think) for more on this or just do a google on [token wml wmlc].

Sorry to be so wordy. Good luck.
Me out.

PS: I still have issues with setting the right content type on my server. Any tried and true solutions (with details!) would be of great interest.

No, you aren't missing anything important. If you can read your WML pages on a WAP phone, everything's fine. If you want to emulate WAP in your browser rather than using a local emulator, try http://www.yospace.com/

Could you tell me how you did this please...I did what you did and even though its loading and giving me a ready response, nothing appears on my emulator! I thought I needed a WAP gateway.
Specs: I am running Apache on win 98 2nd ed. and using an emulator and toolkit by NOKIA.
Thanx