Push for WAP Soon Available
by Tobias Ryberg, CEO Rydato
A beep! As you pick up your phone the late breaking news headline is already beaming on its display. Since the beginning of WAP there has been an intention to enable information delivery with push technology. It has been around for a while now and still we have not seen any working solutions, but the standard is ready and we will not have to wait much longer.
Push Message Framework
The push technology framework consists of an ordinary WAP-network expanded with a push-gateway that is able to deliver the push message from the initiator to all subscribers registered as receivers. A push message can contain two different data types: Service Initiator (SI) and Service Loading (SL), both of which are XML-applications like WML. The important differences between them are that SI only sends an alert that data in the form of a WML-document is available for downloading, while SL may interrupt other activities and force a message to be fetched automatically from the assigned server and then displayed by the browser. The only thing required to become a provider of push messages is access to a push gateway. This however remains an insurmountable obstacle, as long no such software is available. The receiver must have a browser capable of interpreting SI and SL and be registered as subscriber by the provider. This way there will hopefully be no spamming.
Possible applications
As always our imagination is the only limit for how this new technology can be applied. News services and similar things, like the latest stock quotes or continuous reports about the current score in the ongoing game of your favorite team, are quite obvious. Push messaging can also become a great channel for information to all sorts of mobile workforces or other groups of people whose activities depend on a constant flow of updated information. Many sorts of sophisticated advertising will certainly be created if only people are ready to accept it. Push messaging has the potential to become a very potent tool for direct marketing.
Try it out!
Even though push technology is not yet available in the real world, nothing prevents you from simulating it on your ordinary computer. The latest version of Nokia WAP Toolkit (2.0) includes push simulation and documentation about how to create a test application using Java-servlets running on the company's own WAP server software.
The test software is available for download from forum.nokia.com.
Glossary
Push-technology - Active transmission - "pushing" - of data to a receiver within a network.
SI - Service Indication, an XML-application used by WAP for push messages.
SL - Service Loading, an XML-application used by WAP for push messages.
WAP - Wireless Application Protocol, a standard for mobile Internet.
WML - Wireless Markup Language, an XML-based markup language used by WAP.
XML - eXtensible Markup Language, a general standard for coding of documents.
