Developing Mobile Wireless Applications

The deck-of-cards metaphor underlies nearly all content developed for mobile wireless technologies. Standard, high-level application-development technologies, which are available for most major hardware platforms, ease this development task because they are optimized for the severe restrictions on a mobile device's screen size, processing power, and battery life. We discuss three major application-development technologies: the wireless application protocol (WAP), NTT DoCoMo's i-mode, and Sun's Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME). Each lets developers create content for the current and upcoming generation of mobile wireless devices.