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Blog WAP Interface

My blog now has a WAP interface. Why? Well, it started as playing around, and then I gave a copy to Ray Camden and have since been keeping up with his blog via my cell phone (in airports, taxis, wherever). It’s been working so well, that I added lots more functionality to the code over this past weekend. For those of you who have never played with WAP, it is a protocol (similar to HTTP) used to deliver content for devices (using a language named WML). WAP momentum died a few years back, and even though just about every device with Internet access supports it (and even though Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, AOL, and others have WAP interfaces to their sites), no one really discusses WAP anymore. I for one still like WAP, I think it died because expectations were wrong more than anything else, and I think that the technology still has value. Anyway, back to my blog – if you have a WAP enabled device, the WAP interface is at http://www.forta.com/blog/wap.cfm. The WAP interface supports reading entries, browsing, and even searching. I have submitted the WAP code to Ray for possible inclusion in his distribution, in the meantime if you use Ray’s blog code and want a copy of wap.cfm let me know. And when I get around to it I’ll write a WAP admin interface, so that I’ll be able to post blog entries from my phone as well.

4 responses to “Blog WAP Interface”

  1. Mike Krisher Avatar
    Mike Krisher

    Good stuff Ben. I completely agree about WAP. I am busy writing a WAP extension to my blog as well along with a portal system I wrote for the Pocket PC. I recently was sent a MS Smartphone. It is nice that the IE flavor supports other standards like XHTML, but WAP still works the best for devices that are aimed at one-handed operation. I’ll be viewing your site via WAP. Thanks.

  2. Ben Forta Avatar
    Ben Forta

    I used to be part of the W@P Forum, and when I attended the meetings I used to cringe when I heard presenters talk about "surfing the net on a phone" or "Internet access from your phone" and so on. The technology was set up for failure because it was represented as something that it was not. WAP works best for simple menu selections and reading text – news stories, stock price checks, and so on. Simple data entry is useable too, but only small fields and few of them. Too many people tried to do too much with WAP, and of course it could not live up to those expectations. Blogging, however, or reading blogs, is a perfect WAP application. And Ray Camden’s blog is now using my WAP code too. Any others?

  3. Denny Smolinski Avatar
    Denny Smolinski

    I attended your conference in Lansing and thought WAP is awesome. I started developing some applications just to test and see how it worked. I can call a Cold Fusion page that has only static content. As soon as I try anything else dynamic or setting variables, I am not able to see any of the output. I was wondering if there is a special emulator that you use. I have been using Openwave 6.2.2. I have included an example that I cannot seem to work. I am testing locally and was wondering if I have to enable anything on my computer or not? Any help would be appreciated.
    Denny
    <CFCONTENT TYPE="text/vnd.wap.wml"><?xml version=”1.0”?>
    <!DOCTYPE wml PUBLIC "-//WAPFORUM//DTD WML 1.2//EN" "http://www.wapforum.org/DTD/wml12.dtd"&gt;
    <wml>
    <card title="Welcome">
    <p>
    <cfset tom = "cool">
    <cfoutput>
    WAP is #tom#!<br>
    </cfoutput>
    </p>
    </card>
    </wml>

  4. rafael da costa Avatar
    rafael da costa

    xmltransform() function defaults to a line of xml declaration as
    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
    does anyone know how to delete or modify the above default

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