Good Day Everyone! :)

I will be starting on a WAP Development project which requires me to convert an existing flash website to a WAP site.

Since I might not get enough support from the company that I will be working with and for my own interest sake in developing good skills in the area of WAP Development, I would like to sign up with a web host which supports WAP.

I do not have any knowledge (not the slightest bit! :() now on WAP Development but I would like to get a headstart by subscribing to a webhost which supports WAP so that I can practise as I learn.



Hence, It would be nice if you could share some knowledge on WAP Development with me..

1) Which webhost is reliable and cheap? (cos I am still a student :blush: Please give some guidance for me to check out their sites.

2) I have read in the forum that *ALL* web hosts actually supports WAP if they want to, but why is it that they do not enable this feature? Does it takes up a lot of resources? Thought this might attract more customers to sign up with them..

3) Anyone here actually did some WAP Development and successfully uploaded to a webhost and is going 'live'? Which webhost is it on? Care to share?

Thanks so much for reading. :)

Please feel free to send me an email if you could help in any ways possible. Thanks heap!

Regards,
Eric

BTW, does RAQ4 supports WAP? or it has to be on a Windows Platform?

1) Which webhost is reliable and cheap? (cos I am still a student Please give some guidance for me to check out their sites.

Hostmatters [ http://www.hostmatters.com ]. I think they have WAP enabled. They are cheap and there support is great. Annette, a partner in the company, visits this board frequently.

2) I have read in the forum that *ALL* web hosts actually supports WAP if they want to, but why is it that they do not enable this feature? Does it takes up a lot of resources? Thought this might attract more customers to sign up with them..

I dun think it takes up a lot of resources. It would take the same amount of resources as a html page would. :) Well, I guess they are just lazy, nothing else ;) I dun think there are not too many peoply who need it enabled right now.

3) Anyone here actually did some WAP Development and successfully uploaded to a webhost and is going 'live'? Which webhost is it on? Care to share?

I have made a couple of pages in WAP, and tested them, on my Palm Top. :) Other then that, I havent.

WAP is usually not enabled because it's not enabled by default when someone (e.g. a hosting company) takes control of the server. Usually only the most basic MIME-types are activated, and you have to add MIME-types yourself like .js, .css, .xsl, .whatever (or ask your host to activate the particular format you'd like to use for you)

Originally posted by redarrow
Good Day Everyone! :)

I will be starting on a WAP Development project which requires me to convert an existing flash website to a WAP site.



Well the one thing I do know is it won't be a 'conversion' as such, but rather a total rebuild. As I understand it .wml is a very simplistic language (sort of like .html's inbred second cousin *lol*). Currently the thinking is it may be a dead duck already as the infighting as to a standard is going nowhere fast. I spent some time looking into it a while (and was looking for a WAP host), but researching led me to notice a lot of resistance from the web community in general (ZDNet articles in particular).

Burlee.com states a commitment to WAP and provides support for it (as stated on their site), but they're not the cheapest host about.

In regards to the development process, tag listings are rare and books impossible to find. There is a few WYSIWYG WAP tools around the net (a few for free actually). If you're a Dreamweaver user, the MM exchange has a Nokia development 'plugin' (at about 9 meg or so). I got it on a CD a while ago, but it whined about java runtimes and died on my machine so I couldn't tell you in it was any good.

The main thing with WAP as I see it is expense to use it. (from an end user's p.o.v.) Where I am, it's about $1 a minute on a mobile phone, so it's a hell of a lot of money to view some nasty green and grey lines of text.

Finally from a designers end, talk about lack of compatibility!! *grin* Mobiles, to Palms, or Jornada - that's a lot of different screen sizes to work through.

Greg Moore
http://www.akashik.net

Almost all servers have WAP enabled.Instead of HTML use WML and the device will interpet it into a small website on the device.