Conformance and Interoperability

The WAP Forum views vendor interoperability as an important element to the success of WAP products. In order to provide as high a probability as is technically possible that two WAP products developed independently by two different vendors will successfully interoperate, a rigorous definition of conformance, compliance, and testing has been developed.

Conformance answers the question, 'Does an implementation meet the standard as written?' The WAP Forum charters a neutral third party to build a comprehensive test suite from its specifications. Usually, implementations are tested against known references.

Interoperability answers the question, 'Will this implementation work with other products developed to the same standard?' Interoperability testing uses a test suite designed to test implementation-to-implementation compatibility, and implementations are tested against each other. Interoperability testing is not focused on compliance - two products with the same non-compliant implementation will be interoperable.

The WAP Forum Certification Program is focused on conformance, but offers some interoperability testing as well. The Certification Program covers the entire value chain as shown in Figure 7-13.

Figure 7-13: Interoperability and compliance

To improve interoperability at the authoring level, the WAP Forum provides authoring guidelines to improve the accessibility of WAP content. To certify WAP clients and servers, the WAP Forum conducts interoperability testing of an implementation against multiple reference implementations using a predefined suite of test cases.

The WAP Forum has defined a number of Class Conformance Profiles, e.g. Class A, Class B, and Class C. An implementation may be certified in one or more class. The class conformance requirements are specified in WAP Class Conformance Requirements.^[41] Each WAP Specification includes static conformance requirements (SCRs) for that specification. These define which features are mandatory and optional and are the basis for the conformance test suite.

^[41]WAP Forum, 'WAP Transport Layer End-to-End Security Specification.'