B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

350 B2B Integration — A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce
Appliance or host/server programming not required — The preponderance
of wireless middleware products possess a development environment
that shields the developer from having to understand the appliance and
host-based development environments.
Mainframe to client/server systems migration supported — Many
companies are migrating from mainframes to client/server systems.
Middleware is a cost-effective solution for supporting these migrations,
enabling connections to both mainframes and client/server databases,
simultaneously.
Multiple-vendor appliances support — Most middleware products
interface with a wide variety of handheld devices.
12.3.1. Wireless Access Protocol (WAP)
Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) is an open, global standard that
enables mobile devices to be compatible with the majority of bearer
networks such as Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA), Global
System for Mobile Communications (GSM) and next-generation network
standards. WAP has been constructed on modified Internet protocols
and permits mobile devices on non IP-based networks to connect to the
Internet.
WAP is an application environment and a communications protocol.
WAP sits astride a variety of wireless carriers and provides services
such as compression, encryption, the integration of telephony and data
services and, most importantly, the wireless application architecture that
permits the building of WAP application programs that run on smart
phones (i.e., WAP applications). In a practical sense, WAP applications
deliver WML-tagged, instead of HTML-tagged documents to a browser.
Usability challenges include the following: Internet on mobile devices,
small screens, phone keypad, slow connection speeds and no standardized
browser behavior. An often-mentioned competitor to WML is cHTML
that has been popularized by Japan's iMode service.
The success of this standard will depend on the penetration of WAPenabled
devices, the development and recognition of useful applications
and the rollout of WAP gateways from Ericsson, Motorola, Nokia and
Phone.com. Negatives of WAP are associated with the fact that it offers