Webmaster's Guide to the Wireless Internet part 9. The Webmaster’s Guide to the Wireless Internet provides the Wireless Webmaster with all of the tools necessary to build the next generation Internet. Packed with the essential information they need to design, develop, and secure robust, e-commerce enabled wireless Web sites. This book is written for advanced Webmasters who are experienced with conventional Web site design and are now faced with the challenge of creating sites that fit on the display of a Web enabled phone or PDA | 52 Chapter 2 Wireless Architecture Introduction Computer systems are in a constant state of evolution. Consider just the aspect of how we have gotten computers to interact with each other. The first large mainframe computers ran software locally and required the operator to be physically present. As computer networks gained popularity a new client-server type of application emerged as developers we were then required to build software that not only communicated with the end user but another computer system as well. Over time developers realized that talking to multiple remote computers is only slightly more difficult than talking to just one and multiple tier architectures were born. It is not uncommon today to see an application that requires the availability of at least two other computers in order to run. The mobile Internet is about to change the way we think about Internet applications. Not only do all these devices communicate via different markup languages but they also don t use the underlying protocol of the Internet TCP mobile world introduces a new type of component the gateway that sits between these two disparate networks and enables them to communicate. But they don t just translate information they help our small memory-constrained mobile devices participate on the Internet by validating content before it is sent to them and storing information that they do not have enough space to accommodate. We look at how the mobile world is set up and what you need to learn in order to take advantage of this exciting new look at the role of a Wireless Application Protocol WAP gateway the requirements of a WAP server and various client also examine some of the competitors to WAP and identify the ways in which they are better or worse at handling mobile data. Our look at wireless architectures would not be complete without an overview of wireless communications standards and how they affect the performance of your data application.
