Summary

Overview

Many technologies are available to aid with the development and deployment of wireless Internet applications. Using these technologies will make wireless application development much more approachable, increasing developer productivity. As demonstrated in the previous chapter, you can use common content-generation technologies to create wireless content. It is only when more sophisticated wireless Internet applications are required that existing Web technology is not adequate and problems start to arise; for example, applications that need to target multiple markup languages on multiple devices over multiple wireless networks. It is for these applications that products focused on wireless development and deployment become truly valuable.

In this chapter we are going to look at the technologies commonly used to implement wireless Internet applications. They are divided into four categories:

• Microbrowsers

• Wireless application servers

• Development tools

• Wireless service providers

For each category we will investigate the key technology features and summarize related vendor solutions. The goal is provide you with enough information so that you can make educated decisions as to which technology and vendors you want to evaluate.