It’s the content stupid!
With WAP backlash increasing worldwide, those in the know have pointed to what they call the poor implementation of WAP technology as the major culprit behind its less-than-enthusiastic response, not the technology itself.
As such, the wireless industry is looking to the application development community to deliver the compelling content that will remove the cloud looming over today’s wireless Internet market. With critics largely panning the difficult-to-navigate current generation of WAP services, developers are being wooed to come up with something better.
But developers say vendors-which are jockeying for proprietary position in the nascent wireless Internet market-are a big part of the problem.
“From a developer standpoint, it’s a very frustrating time,” said Victor Brilon, senior technology architect and director of the Online Testing Lab for Anywhere-YouGo.com, a Web-based forum for application developers. “WAP is supposed to be a standard, but developers are dealing with different devices, protocols and gateways. It’s a real headache.”
While carriers and vendors have joined on paper to support WAP, they’re not exactly joining hands at the WAP Forum singing “Kumbaya.” Most are trying to push their proprietary solutions in a competitive manner to stake out their territory. The intellectual property rights lawsuit between Phone.com Inc. and Geoworks Corp. is an extreme example of the struggles many say are common within the WAP ranks. According to Brilon, the industry needs to sort out these side battles for developers to flourish.
“If there was a standard everybody would stick to, it would make things a lot easier,” he said. “The WAP specification is very young. There are a lot of ambiguous areas about how certain things are done. Added to that is every manufacturer trying to make every device better than the other guy’s. It’s very problematic for developers.”
Bryan Morgan, managing editor of the Wireless Developer’s Network-an online publication charged with disseminating information to wireless developers-agreed.
“Manufacturers either a) don’t implement parts of the standard or b) build the technology to meet the features of their individual devices. That’s a real problem,” he said.
Some challenges developers face when turning to the wireless world simply cannot be helped. The computing and Internet industries slowly grew to mass-market acceptance over several years, and competition among those industries grew at the same pace. Developers had years to slowly work on improving HTML applications while demand built slowly.
But the wireless industry has been one of the most competitive industries on the planet long before data services came along, and developers are asked to play the differentiating role in an already raging battle-and they don’t even know where the battle lines are drawn.
“The Internet had the luxury to grow organically. By the time it got to the point where people were interested in it, there was already an infrastructure,” Brilon said. “With WAP, there was a consensus among a bunch of companies that this is going to be a standard, and they’ll worry about applications and infrastructure later.”
Whereas once developers concerned themselves with a small number of platforms and a common device-the computer-they now must absorb the highly fragmented realities of the wireless industry.
“The different thing about the Internet was you never needed to understand more than your browser talking to the server. Now you have wireless devices, gateways and then the Web server and all bring added complexity,” Brilon said. “A lot of the frustration is just understanding how wireless infrastructure works, like designing for new user interfaces. How do you make applications that can serve PDAs (personal digital assistants) and phones, while still feeding off the same back-end database?”
Plus, carriers are hoping to piggy-back on the success of the wired Internet, hyping the wireless Internet beyond its reality.
“It’s marketed as wireless Web surfing and that puts the picture in people’s minds that it’s like sitting at a PC-it leads to huge expectations,” WirelessDevNet’s Morgan said. “Developers would like the marketing to be more like pushing pinpoint and quick access capability; to search for specific items and get in and out quickly.”
The wireless industry also has not provided enough information to developers, the developers charge. Organizations like AnywhereYouGo.com and WirelessDevNet.com were created to fill this support gap.
“A large part of the reason we started this site was because there were no independent resources online,” Brilon said. “You had to go to the manufacturers’ Web sites and get their information from each.”
AnywhereYouGo.com provides WAP training, news, tutorials and several testing facilities-an online testing lab for smaller developers to work out the basic bugs of their applications and a physical Wireless Internet Lab in the United Kingdom to test larger, industrial type applications.
Comparing results for the basic-level online lab with the more intense tests done in the physical lab, AnywhereYouGo.com found developers still need a great deal of education.
“We found the error rate for bad pages were the same, about 30 percent. That’s an incredibly high number,” Brilon said. “We’re seeing the same sort of errors and the same error rate. They’re either writing code that’s not compliant or developers are writing code that only works on specific devices.”
Morgan said many of the errors are caused by the process of rewriting existing code to meet WML.
“A lot of developers have a problem with WAP in general because it’s a whole new markup language. The vast majority of developers with in-house HTML applications don’t like it,” he said. “It’s not hard to learn at all, but you have thousands of scripts you have to go back through and add all these `if’ statements. It’s a complicated process.”
As a result, developers are becoming extremely cautious about WAP technology. Yet, it hasn’t stopped them from exploring the space; programmers thirsty for education have flocked to wireless developer conferences nationwide.
“I think every company that got burned because they were not on the Web quickly enough is not going to make the same mistake with wireless,” Brilon said. “But developers by nature are very cynical and cautious. Management by nature is not so cynical. A lot of developers are saying, `I’m doing this because my boss is telling me to.’ But developers who have been around for a long time see the potential.”
“Unanimously, everyone agrees the wireless Internet is something they need to support,” Morgan said. “There are wireless extensions coming out to almost any application you can think of. So there’s interest, but they question whether they should hold off before supporting WAP, because they read all these articles saying `WAP is crap.’ “
As WAP rolls out in the United States in the next three to eight months, the confusion and scrutiny is only expected to intensify.
“It’s going to be a difficult time to be an application developer in the next three years,” said Brilon.
