What is WAP?
What is WAP?
WAP 
Mobile phones really started to take off during the 1990’s when they became ‘digital’. Previously, they were heavy analogue affairs that were cumbersome and not at all practical to carry around. The new ‘digital networks’ or ‘2G’ cellular handsets revolutionised mobile phone use as the phones were so much smaller and a lot lighter as they did not need huge batteries to function. As the 1990’s progressed, there was an explosion in mobile phone ownership and network providers quickly realised that simply having just a phone that functioned as a phone was not enough – consumers were starting to demand access to data services so that they could connect to the internet through their phones whilst they were out and about. This is when the idea for a means of wirelessly connecting to the internet was born.
The race was on to provide a platform from which mobile phones could connect wirelessly to the internet. Four of the main players at the time started to develop their own platforms from which to realise this ideal, and capture the entire market. However, with mobile phones coming in all sorts of specifications, shapes, screen sizes, capacities it was proving to be a very difficult task to provide a ‘one size fits all’ solution. So the WAP Forum was born and its purpose was to work out a way that all companies could access data services wirelessly.
The WAP Forum
In the middle of the 1990’s, major mobile phone companies realised that there woud definitely be some sort of advantage to providing a new technology that would allow users to access information ‘on the go’. Individual companies tried and were unsuccessful in creating an ‘industry standard’ so they eventually decided to work together to develop a universal wireless data-access platform. In 1997, WAP was created in response to the need and demand for this. All the companies involved brought all their efforts together to produce what was a ‘standard protocol’ . They wanted to eliminate the problems of incompatibility between different handsets and network. By working together, there was an accepted standard achieved. The ‘standard’ was to be known as ‘WAP’ which means Wireless Application Protocol. Nowadays, the WAP Forum is known as the Open Mobile Alliance.
Purpose of WAP
First and foremost the purpose of WAP was to provide an accepted industry standard that was compatible across all networks to allow data transfer wirelessly. The WAP forum further issued a complete suite of specification documents featuring – a transmission protocol stack (WDP, WTP, WSP)
- a markup language (WML), an image format (WBMP)
- a binary compressed representation for XML (WBXML)
- a middle-ware component architecture (the WAP gateway).
The Forum’s aims ultimately were to produce a method of transferring data wirelessly that was:
- To be independent of wireless network standard
- Open to all
- Proposed to the appropriate standards bodies
- Scalable across transport options
- Scalable across device types
- Extensible over time to new networks and transports