Tuesday, February 24, 2009

WAP Architecture - Part VII

Conformance and Interoperability

The WAP Forum views vendor interoperability as an important element to the success of WAP products. In order toprovide as high a probability as is technically possible that two WAP products developed independently by twodifferent vendors will successfully interoperate, a rigorous definition of conformance, compliance, and testing has beendeveloped.

Conformance answers the question, “Does an implementation meet the standard as written?” The WAP Forum chartersa neutral third party to build a comprehensive test suite from its specifications. Usually, implementations are testedagainst known references.Interoperability answers the question, “Will this implementation work with other products developed to the samestandard?”

Interoperability testing uses a test suite designed to test implementation to implementation compatibility,and implementations are tested against each other. Interoperability testing is not focused on compliance—two productswith the same non-compliant implementation will be interoperable.


The WAP Forum Certification Program is focused on conformance, but offers some interoperability testing as well.The Certification Program covers the entire value chain as shown in Figure 13.

To improve interoperability at the authoring level, the WAP Forum provides authoring guidelines to improve theaccessibility of WAP content. To certify WAP clients and servers, the WAP Forum conducts interoperability testing ofan implementation against multiple reference implementations using a predefined suite of test cases.

The WAP Forum has defined a number of Class Conformance Profiles, e.g. Class A, Class B, and Class C. Animplementation may be certified in one or more class. The class conformance requirements are specified in[ClassConform].

Each WAP Specification includes static conformance requirements (SCRs) for that specification. These define whichfeatures are mandatory and optional and are the basis for the conformance test suite.

Reference : Wireless Application Protocol Forum, Ltd, 2000-2001

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