Excerpts

Living the Wireless Life Building wireless applications for businesses and consumers is as challenging for me today as it was in the early 1990s. Today's challenge: Given a miniature device, microscreen, and low data-transmission rate, figure out how to deliver interesting and useful mobile applications. This means being a detective to discover the identity of the mobile person. It also means living the wireless mobile life, with all its devices. These are the vital parts of the ongoing stories wireless developers get to tell. There is a magic point in mobile wireless development when, as you are building, you find the medium of wireless. Often at that point, what you build no longer makes sense on the PC desktop. Using wireless handhelds, Web phones, pagers, voice portals, and radio-based appliances, you can provide personal services that no one on the Internet has ever seen. You create. You find purpose. Newfound purposes and new wireless content can challenge and change the way traditional "unmobile" businesses operate. Your customers, and most people, already use the conventional Internet. But when they are mobile, with wireless Internet devices, they use a new breed of information and services. If you can tune in to how a mobile business works and see what a person on the go actually needs, then you will begin to understand why engineers are building innovative and powerful wireless applications. When I speak with new engineers and wireless clients, I naturally start with devices and move on to wireless networks and applications. It seems that the less the audience knows, the more eager we become to teach. I am always tempted to fill them in on the advantages of CDMA, SMS, XML, i-mode, GPS, HDR, 802.11a . . . until at some point, I can see that my audience is lost. As Miles Davis once said, "If you understood what I said, you would be me." Everyone wants to know wireless technology, because people are ready to build the wireless Internet and would like to know all the rules. Yet, I have found that long speeches saturate any listener. A book is my way to slow down and give the reader the time to measure out what he or she wants to know. Upon reflection, that is how I learned the wireless Internet--over time, in successive overlays of wireless concepts gained from professionals and practice. I thought it best to produce this for you in the same way--as a progressive set of illustrations and explanations of the key ideas, experiences with mobile users, the thinking that goes into a wireless application, and source code learned from wireless projects worldwide. Each overlay helps form a better engineering practice, improves client communications, and helps you do your best work. Our job is to make new things. To bring things into existence, there is no substitute for downloading wireless device emulators, writing code, hacking databases to mobilize them, and watching it all come together as a new wireless Internet service. This is a time when open source and wireless technology are restructuring the Internet. The world has become an exchange for wireless professionals who are fast at work and are willing to share knowledge. Some of the best wireless applications may have been written years ago; others are yet to be. In anticipation of great future wireless technology, I summon many good years of lessons from the wireless industry and have tried to capture inspiration from the best, for I have worked with the best. My early years at General Magic, Sony, and Motorola were spent helping produce intriguing wireless consumer and business applications. As a result, this book offers knowledge from great engineers, masters in telecommunications, programmers of key applications, hackers of mobile content, designers of great interaction interfaces, and builders of smart wireless architectures. You will see why professional developers see that the wireless Internet, not the PC Internet, is already the primary access method in Japan and Europe, and is emerging in North America. Producers of wireless applications in the wireless hot spots of Tokyo, Taiwan, San Diego, and Finland talk about their mobile wireless applications, practices, essential principles, rules of thumb, and ideas. My main goals are to help you understand key wireless ideas, speak the correct language, and make relevant wireless applications and architectures. The critical telecommunications and computer concepts will give you the edge to build current and next-generation wireless services. Some wireless technology may change, but basic concepts and principled thinking should remain the same and give you a solid footing. As a project team learns a common language, it can rapidly build effective products to create the "houses" of the mobile wireless world. The mobile user is a visitor to the "wireless house." This book is written for those who will build that house. −− *− *−* −*− −*** * *− **− *−** ** * **− To decipher this, see the "International Morse Code" section in appendix A. What This Book Covers To make good, perhaps great, wireless Internet applications is our goal. To help you understand the technology of two industries equally well, this book tells the story of telecommunications and the Internet. If you are a software programmer, an experienced engineer, or an interested executive manager, this book explains and illustrates the key technologies in a uniform manner. It is for you, your team, or your interested clients who like being well informed. It shows how wireless applications on every major platform are developed, and it explains the central issues of wireless architecture. Perhaps you need to tell your boss about why you needed to buy this book. Wireless Internet Applications and Architecture is comprehensive. It covers the core telecommunications and computer technologies and many wireless software techniques, applications, and architectural standards in one place. This book discusses wireless hardware, software, network, and new content from a neutral point of view; it is not wedded to one device or technology. If you are working on a wireless project, the information in this book can save time in the process because it lists the resources you will need and shows how experts solve the tough problems. It contains invaluable contributions from developers working on existing and emerging wireless technology, who shared some examples of their wireless applications. It explains the wireless XML, Java, and Web tools and content production techniques. To get the big picture, we show wireless networks, the programming model for devices, and wireless Internet applications close up. Web cell phones, handhelds, pagers, voice portals, and Web PCs are examined in detail. This book dissects the new classes of mobile wireless applications for professionals and general consumers. Two special features of this book are the rare source code in Part II (industrial location-based algorithms fundamental to content and services) and the section "Rebuilding Your Web Site" in chapter 18, which explains how to transition your Web site to the wireless Internet. This book appears at an interesting time, when the world's telephony and computer standards are converging to deliver a wireless digital carrier. It shows developers how to use the new portable communication devices to connect mobile users with purposeful wireless applications and personalized content that originates entirely from the Internet. The good news for developers is that wireless Internet development is largely an extension of familiar Web site engineering. Server engineers will learn the many new and changing standards and find out in detail the best ways to reach all the wireless targets. Mobile end users' requirements are new to many developers. This book teaches skills and techniques such as persona development to help you understand, discover, invent, and deliver a new personal technology that has already changed parts of the world. Wireless Internet Applications and Architecture , an ideal companion for the single-platform development book, provides a full context for wireless development. This book covers essential aspects of popular wireless development environments and wireless servers. It is helpful in understanding embedded wireless systems, such as an in-car dashboard navigator, satellites, and other "closed" systems. The book takes a quick but important look at fixed wireless systems such as MMDS. The focus remains, however, on mobile systems that developers are programming today. After you read this book, you should be able to explain wireless technology, be able to produce good wireless applications, and know what it takes to build servers and make long-term architectural decisions. This book also serves as a continuing wireless applications reference. How This Book Is Organized To help you understand, write, and build wireless applications, the book is divided into three parts. Essential wireless themes, however, are woven throughout. Part I introduces the wireless Internet, language, and core concepts. In the first part, you are the general developer, learning the sometimes confusing language and technical issues of wireless computing and communication development. The part begins by describing the trends, forces, and organizations that are shaping the growth of the wireless Internet. Part II shows how to create wireless applications and how to make them better. In the second part, you are the application developer, learning how to build great wireless applications. This part walks you through key applications for the Web phone, the handheld, the pager, and the voice portal. The chapters examine how to construct messaging, browsing, interactive, and voice portal applications by showing application code and examples of mobile content. Wireless projects are described fully with diagrams, examples, and source code. By building a few of these projects (this book looks at a series of them), your skills will mature and you will learn to make sound architectural decisions. Part III examines the components of wireless architecture. In the third part, you are the architect, learning the principles of wireless architecture and how servers for multiple wireless devices are built. These chapters describe wireless standards and practices, as well as the effect wireless architectural elements have over time. This part of the book goes beyond wireless applications to provide a more comprehensive set of technical standards and useful reference materials that people throughout the computer and telecommunications business use. It has been organized sequentially from long-term to short-range issues for the architect who must make lasting decisions. Whereas Part II shows single wireless client applications, Part III looks at the back-end server and multiple-client solutions. It is for the software engineer who is looking to become an architect, to advance a relationship with senior design members, or to understand how to make significant development decisions for wireless applications and servers. The appendices offer a broad range of resources. They contain references such as the FCC spectrum allocation and a "tip sheet" for looking up auctions or examining unallocated spectrum. There are some "retro" resources commonly used in wireless projects today. For example, ASCII is used in byte encoding for WAP; Morse code is used in messaging; and Soundex encoding is handy for wireless text messaging. The appendices also include information about wireless research, standards bodies, and companies, as well as lists of written resources in books, periodicals, papers, reports, and articles on the Web. Although the content of this book is presented in three parts, each part contains important wireless concepts that developers tend to overlook, but that deserve discussion. Each theme is introduced as a subject, then applied, and finally deployed. For example, in Part I you discover wireless location-based applications. In Part II you see how to develop them with source code to key industrial algorithms. In Part III you can go on to understand GPS satellites, what the FCC docket says about E911 requirements and their Revision Order schedules to 2006 for handsets and networks, and the alternatives to consider. Another important theme is the uniqueness of the mobile audience, which is introduced in Part I. Part II shows how the audience can be characterized as personas. Part III continues with a wireless publishing model, personalization engines, and transcoding architectures to support real identities. 0201733544P12052001 Excerpted from Wireless Internet Applications and Architecture: Building Professional Wireless Applications Worldwide by Mark Beaulieu All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.