B336 Lab Week 11

B336 Advanced Internet Computing

Laboratory Week 11

Learning Objective:

Get familiar with using the Nokia Toolkit.

Learn to write WAP applications using WML (Wireless Markup Language).

Required Reading:

Week 10 lecture 2
Week 11 lecture 1

WML Online Reference:

The Nokia WAP Developers' Guide - comes with the Nokia Toolkit, and includes a comprehensive description of WML tags.

Official WML specifications - for more detailed technical reference if you need look up specific tags. You may save the PDF file to avoid repeated downloads if accessing it from home. Because of copyright, please DO NOT save it on the university's lab machines.

Access to Software:

You will require the Nokia Toolkit 2.0 for this laboratory. The software is available in lab SC2.31.

External students may download the required software and install it on your own machine. Internal students may do the same, but are encouraged to still attend labs for supervision when doing the exercises below.

Instructions:

Start up the Nokia toolkit. This will bring up two windows. The one on the left will display the application code. The window on the right (the one which looks like a mobile phone) shows what the code will display on a standard Nokia-type mobile phone. Other mobile phone brands will have similar keys.

Using the File>Open menu item, look at the following example WML decks supplied with the toolkit one at a time. For a standard installation, they should be in the directory C:\Program Files\Nokia\WAP_Toolkit_2.0\Samples.

Welcome1.wmlWelcome2.wml
Welcome3.wml

Click on the "Show" button on the left window to display the decks in the right window. Learn to use the phone's navigation arrows to move up-down-left-right through the decks.

The WML tags for these examples are fairly obvious. Learn how each tag gets displayed.

Look at further example WML decks supplied with the toolkit one at a time.

weather.wml Deck1.wml Deck2a.wml Deck2b.wml MultiCard.wml readme.wml

Learn to use the two options button (just below the phone screen) to select options.

The WML tags for these examples are more involved than (2). Learn what each of the tags in them do.

For all of the example decks in 2 and 3, get a feel of how restrictive the input is when restricted only to the phone keyboard, as compared to other input devices such as the mouse and the full keyboard.

Exercises:

Write 3 decks, each consisting of one card on information about a unit (unit code, unit title, and enrolment options) belonging to a school in Murdoch University (eg. B102, B334, B336 for the School of IT).

Write a deck which gives the user an option of selecting any one of the 3 decks in (1).

Instead of using 3 decks, put all the information in (1) into one deck of 3 cards, and allow the users to move between them using the option keys on the mobile phone.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of this approach as opposed to (1) when accessed over a wireless network? Hint: each deck is downloaded separately. Think about whether it is better in terms of mobile phone payments to download 3 cards in one shot, or one deck at a time when required. Then think what if there are 30 decks/cards instead of 3?

Instead of using 3 decks, put all the information in (1) into a table in one deck. What are the advantages and disadvantages of this approach as opposed to (1) when accessed over a wireless network.

As mentioned in the lectures, WML is defined in XML (ie. it is an XML application). Think about all the things you have learnt to do with XML in the past few weeks, and how they can be used in WML. Eg.

Write an XSLT style sheet to convert from the welcome?.wml decks to HTML, for normal web browsers to access these WML files.

Use an XML validator to ensure that the WML files are syntactically correct.

Use XML Notepad or IE5 to view the tree structure of the WML files.

(Hard) Use an XML parser API to read weather.wml and store the data in a database.

etc... think up your own interesting things to do.

We will be looking at WMLScript in this week's lectures, which will be able to do processing on inputs from . For those adventurous, you may look ahead at the other example decks supplied with the Nokia toolkit which uses WMLScript.

Besides the material in the readings and references above, you may also go through a quick tutorial introduction to WML and WMLScript at webreference.com.

For your assignment 3, start thinking about an interesting WAP application to implement.