WAP Architecture - Part II

Architectural Goals

The goals of the WAP Forum architecture are as follows. This summary is informative and non-exhaustive; the orderof the items does not represent any priority or importance.


· Provide a web-centric application model for wireless data services that utilises the telephony, mobility, and otherunique functions of wireless devices and networks and allows maximum flexibility and ability for vendors toenhance the user experience.

· Enable the personalisation and customisation of the device, the content delivered to it, and the presentation of thecontent.

· Provide support for secure and private applications and communication in a manner that is consistent andinteroperable with Internet security models.

· Enable wireless devices and networks that are currently or in the near future being deployed, including a widevariety of bearers from narrow-band to wide-band.

· Provide secure access to local handset functionality.

· Facilitate network-operator and third party service provisioning.

· Define a layered, scaleable and extensible architecture.

· Leverage existing standards where possible, especially existing and evolving Internet standards.

Architecture Overview

The World-Wide Web Model

The Internet World-Wide Web (WWW) architecture provides a very flexible and powerful programming model (Figure1). Applications and content are presented in standard data formats, and are browsed by applications known as webbrowsers. The web browser is a networked application, i.e., it sends requests for named data objects to a network serverand the network server responds with the data encoded using the standard formats.

The WWW standards specify many of the mechanisms necessary to build a general-purpose applicationenvironment, including:

· Standard naming model – All servers and content on the WWW are named with an Internet-standard UniformResource Locator (URL) [RFC2396].

· Content typing – All content on the WWW is given a specific type thereby allowing web browsers to correctlyprocess the content based on its type [RFC2045, RFC2048].

· Standard content formats – All web browsers support a set of standard content formats. These include theHyperText Markup Language (HTML) [HTML4], scripting languages [ECMAScript, JavaScript], and a largenumber of other formats.

· Standard Protocols – Standard networking protocols allow any web browser to communicate with any web server.The most commonly used protocol on the WWW is the HyperText Transport Protocol (HTTP) [RFC2616],operating on top of the TCP/IP protocol suite [STD0007].

This infrastructure allows users to easily reach a large number of third-party applications and content services. It alsoallows application developers to easily create applications and content services for a large community of clients.