WAP Module Requirements

ACS WAP Module Requirements

I. Introduction

This document specifies the requirements for the ACS4.0 WAP module. WAP4.0 takes the WAP module developed by Andrew Grumet for ACS 3.4 and integrates it with ACS4.0's templating system. This integration allows easy development of applications that serve both WAP and regular desktop browsers, as well as stand-alone WAP-compliant applications.

II. Vision Statement

According to a study in the Industry Standard, by 2005, the number of people accessing the Internet via wireless devices will have grown to about 484 million. To hold a competitive edge in the market of web service/content providers, it is inevitable that the services/contents delivered to desktop browsers today will have to be accessible via mobile devices -- phones, palm pilots, etc. The ACS WAP module provides programmers a painless way to build wireless extensions to existing ACS applicationswithout much change to existing code and data model, as well as building wireless-only applications that integrates seamlessly with other ACS packages.

III. System Overview

A request for a page would be fulfilled in the following manner:

A registered filter in WAP package compares the requesting user agent to a list of wireless agents known to the WAP module (i.e. EricssonR320/R1A, Nokia-WAP-Toolkit/1.2). If the user agent is indentified as a WAP user agent, a content type is set for the text to be returned (text/vnd.wap.wml).
After determining the user agent type, the requested page is processed and appropriate database operations are executed to generate data needed by the templates.
The templating system finds the correct template to parse based on the content type to be returned. It then returns the parsed template with appropriate header information.

Possible Performance Drawbacks:

There is an extra step in each page-serve to determine the user agent type. This step is called regardless whether the service requested provide a wireless port.
Templating system, before returning a template, needs to figure out the appropriate template depending on the user agent.

IV. Use-cases and User-scenarios

Developer
The developer needs to be minimally concerned with what user agent his page is serving. The developer takes care of the database operations as he would for any ACS-backed application, as long as data needed by templates are produced.

Graphic Designer
The graphic designer define different page flow for different browser types by working with the templates. For a particular page, the graphic designer can define one .adp template for the desktop browsers, and a .wdp template for the wireless browsers. The template system figures out what the correct template is for individual user agents.

Site Adiministrator
The site administrator can manage what user agents are recognized as valid WAP agents through the WAP admin interface.

Web surfer
To request a certain page, the user need not to do anything different whether he is using a desktop browser or a WAP-compliant device. The integration of WAP module with the request processor and the templating system serves up the correct page format to the user.

V. Related Links

VI.A Requirements:Data Model

4.00 Browser Type Identification
A table of known WAP user agents is used by WAP package to identify the browser and set the correct content type to be returned.

VI.B Requirements:Templating System

5.00 Template Identification
The template system identifies the appropriate template to return given the desired output content type.

VII Revision History

Document Revision #	Action Taken, Notes	When?	By Whom?
0.1	Creation	11/25/2000	Shan Shan Huang
	Reviewed	11/26/2000	Andrew Grumet
0.2	Revised	11/30/2000	Shan Shan Huang
0.3	Revised to conform to new requirements	12/13/2000	Shan Shan Huang

shuang@arsdigita.com