Chapter 20. WML, ASP, JSP, Servlets, and Perl

This chapter is about a number of topics, such as using XML on the server side of things with Active Server Pages (ASP), JavaServer Pages (JSP), Java servlets, and Perl. It's also about Wireless Markup Language (WML), a popular XML application that is targeted at cordless phones, PDAs, and other relatively simple devices that support the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) and WML browsers that are coming to be called " microbrowsers ." WML is easy to use; you find it in more places these days, and WAP servers are popping up all over the place. In this chapter, I'll take a look at creating WML documents and viewing them in a WML browser.

In this chapter, I'm going to take a look at how to create XML documents from the server side. There are many ways to do that, and we don't have space to cover them all in depth. But we'll get a good idea of how things work in overview (for more details, check out the many books on the subjects we'll see in this chapter). Here, I'll extract data from a small database file, ch20_01.mdb, written in Microsoft Access format, on various different servers. Then I'll format that data using XML and send the resulting XML back to the client. This database file was written to be a simple example and just holds the names of eight students and a letter grade for each student, as you see in Table 20-1.

Table 20-1. Students in ch20_01.mdb

Student	Grade
Ann	C
Mark	B
Ed	A
Frank	A
Ted	A
Mabel	B
Ralph	B
Tom	B

I'll start by using ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) on a server to search ch20_01.mdb and create an XML document displaying the results with ASP.

Server-Side Programming

In the first half of this chapter, which is on server-side programming, I'll be moving through many technologies fairly quickly. Unfortunately, there's no way to provide all the background you need to program in ASP, JSP, Java Servlets, and Perl here, so I'll assume that you can find that background elsewhere if you need it. When discussing WML, which is an XML application, in the second half of the chapter, I won't make any such assumptions. There, we'll start from the ground up.