WAP / WML Noobie (Few Questions)

Hi people.

I woud consider myself as a reasonably experienced web developer, however I am new to making WAP websites (today) and i need to learn more.

I have established that the coding used is WML and WML Script, and it is based on HTML, XML. I have followed the W3Schools tutorial and have gained a basic understanding, but the tutorial was quite basic. I only got to the stage where i was passing variables from page to page.

I need to create a basic WAP website to demonstrate to someone....So could anyone help me with the following questions.

1: Is there a standard Browser that I should DL for local testing? (I currently have WinWAP 3.1)

2: Is there a good, free image processing package that will allow me to save .wbmp files?

3: Lastly, does anyone know of a good tutorial to get me on the road to building a WAP site with a few decent features?

Thanks for any help.
Gareth.

Hi there, welcome to the wonderful world or WAP!

1) I always view what I've built at www.wapsilon.com and then test on a Nokia 7250i, Sont Ericsson T610 and get someone else to test on a Samsung. Wapsilon will alert you to markup errors which is handy but there are also a handful of validators online which will help.

2) Checkout www.download.com as there will be something there. Most newer phones can support gif and jpgs though some are fussier than others. There are also a few image to wbmp conversion tools online which you can find with www.google.com

3) To get the best out of wap I'd suggest you tie it up with a back end scripting language like PHP then you can connect it to databases and do some wonderful stuff with it. Again www.google.com is the best friend you can have on the internet.

Hope this helps, good luck with your ventures!

use Irfanview for saving images to wbmp format...

it is the best program out there and it's free...!

http://www.irfanview.com/

similar to Unix/Linux's ImageMagick

and GD Library

> 1: Is there a standard Browser that I should DL for local testing? (I currently have WinWAP 3.1)

You can download some mobile phone simulators from the mobile phone manufacturer, which can be used for viewing WAP pages from your computer. I downloaded some simulators from Sony Ericcsson's website several months ago. I think those simulators should still be there.

Ok, thanks for the reply’s guys.
I got a book out “WML & WML Script for Beginner’s”

I found that apparently http://www.openwave.com/
was a big WAP oriented site, that also gave away browsers and development kits.

Unfortunately im am temporarily on 56k, so a 60MB file, I am too inpatient to DL. However I have now got a mobile simulator from openwave that is running my WAP sites ok.

I also realised that Fireworks can export files to WBMP, so im sorted there too.

So after looking at WML, all seems quite simple...decks, cards...easy. The WML Script I have briefly scanned over and all the programming principles seem familiar, so im sure its not too hard to get to grips with.

My question now is:
I know some phones these days can render proper HTML docs. (Or at least they look like normal web pages) Is this actually the internet, or is this a more complex WAP language. (MMS?)

Also, I am ok with PHP and I hear you can use PHP with WML. Now can you explain what andymoo meant by "tie it up with a back end scripting language like PHP" Does this mean the PHP script will produce the WML?

is there an example somewhere to help me understand this more.

Thanks, sorry if these questions seem stupid. WML is a few days old to me. Im very early stages of learning.

Cheers people.

OpenWave are BIG they produce browsers for the phones, well most of them from what I know.

Ouch. I don't envy you at all there, take away my broadband and I get grumpy. (Well even more grumpy than normal)

Cool. Some phones take gif, jpg and png but if you're going into PHP with WAP you'll be able to use the PHP $HTTP_ACCEPT variable to find out on a user by user basis. When you tie that up with the $HTTP_USER_AGENT you can build a powerful database of what each phone does and doesn't do.

It seems like you have got off to a good start then, nice one! If you have the basics covered which it seems you have it shouldn't be rocket science for you to get WAP doing what you want it to.

It's just the phones ability to render HTML, MMS is multi media message sending where you can send text, pictures and sounds from one phone to another. Again the $HTTP_ACCEPT variable will tell you more, both on support of HTML and MMS which is a totally different story and still a bit silly as many networks are charging interconnects on them like they did on SMS in the old days.

Yes, a PHP script can produce WML, it just needs to set the headers so the phone can understand it okay. This is great as you can do almost anything with WAP once you marry the two together. Our site uses PHP to select from a database and show the ringtones we have, then we use loops and ifs etc so show the options for ordering and so on..... A quick example:Let us know how you get on!
Cheers

You can use any server-side web language (eg ASP, JSP, PHP, Coldfusion, etc) you like, not necessarily php. Each language has its own pros and cons. Choose one that suits your situation.

One more thing, do you know about the XHTML MP and WAP CSS? XHTML MP and WAP CSS are defined in the WAP 2.0 standard. WML is an older technology for the WAP 1.x standard. Newer mobile phone models should have support for the WAP 2.0. If you are targeting newer mobile phone models, you should use XHTML MP instead of WML.