WIRELESS APPLICATION PROTOCOL

INTRODUCTION
The primary means of communicating information of these days are voice and Internet. The unlimited accesses to Internet and sheer number of people connected to the Internet have made industry captain realize its potential. The industry now plans its marketing and communication strategies around the Internet. Today every banking to education, research to health-care is affected by it. E-mail is the way to communicate today. Practically who use the Internet uses E-mail. The wireless technologies and the Internet were growing separately. The wireless industry initially struggled within a number of issues like low bandwidth and low connection stability, to bring Internet to its users. They came together to form a common forum to tackle these issues. This forum is called the WAP.The wireless application protocol.

The Wireless Application Protocol is a standard developed by the WAP Forum, a group founded by Nokia, Ericsson, Phone.com (formerly Unwired Planet), and Motorola. The WAP Forum’s membership roster now includes computer industry heavyweights such as Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, and Intel along with several hundred other companies. According to the WAP Forum, the goals of WAP are 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.

WAP defines a communications protocol as well as an application environment. In essence, it is a standardized technology for cross-platform, distributed computing. It sound similar to the World Wide Web. WAP is very similar to the combination of HTML and HTTP except that it adds in one very important feature: optimization for low-bandwidth, low-memory, and low-display capability environments. These types of environments include PDAs, wireless phones, pagers, and virtually any other communications device.
Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) is a result of continuous work to define an industry-wide specification for developing applications that operate over wireless communication networks. The scope for the WAP Forum is to define market is growing very quickly and reaching new customers and providing new services. To enable operators and manufacturers to meet the challenges in advanced services, differentiation, and fast/flexible service creation, WAP defines a set of protocols in transport, session and application layers.