Adding WAP Support To Apache
WAP is the abbreviation of Wireless Application Protocol, is a communication protocol for providing Internet communications and advanced telephony services on handheld wireless devices such as mobile phones, pagers, two-way radios etc. In simple words, WAP is a set of protocols for accessing information over a mobile wireless network. WAP is optimized for low-display capability, low-memory, and low-bandwidth devices.
WAP supports most wireless networks like CDPD, CDMA, GSM, PDC, PHS, TDMA, FLEX, ReFLEX, iDEN, TETRA, DECT, etc and is supported by all operating systems. Also, WAP supports languages like HTML, XML, and WML, which are specifically designed for small screen and one-hand navigation devices without a keyboard. WAP script used by WAP protocol is similar to JavaScript, it demands minimal memory and CPU power compared to JavaScript and other scripting languages.
The actions which are carried out when we are accessing a website using a WAP-enabled device are listed below.
First, we turn on our device and open the minibrowser.
Then the device sends out a radio signal, searching for service.
A connection is made with your service provider.
Select a website that you wish to browse.
A request is sent to a gateway server using WAP.
The gateway server retrieves the information via HTTP from the website.
The gateway server encodes the HTTP data as WML.
The WML-encoded data is sent to your device.
Then you will see the wireless Internet version of the Web page you selected.
As we already mentioned WAP consists of a mixture of WML and WMLScript code and source files for these languages are stored in either .wml or .wmls files, .wmlc standing for “wml-compiled” and .wmlsc stands for “wmlscript-compiled”.
The one thing you must keep in mind is that standard Web servers must be made aware of the MIME type of a file before serving it; otherwise, you may receive a MIME Type Not Supported error message or something similar.
To enable WAP support, that is WML Script support in Apache, adds the following to your httpd.conf file.
AddType text/vnd.wap.wml wml
AddType text/vnd.wap.wmlscript wmls
AddType application/vnd.wap.wmlc wmlc
AddType application/vnd.wap.wmlscriptc wmlsc
AddType image/vnd.wap.wbmp wbmp
The third and fourth lines are added for providing support for compiled WML and WML Script files. The fifth line provides support for WAP’s image format, Wireless Bitmap (wbmp).
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