WMLScript for Not Yet Techies

"Computer Careers: The New Scripting Language for High Tech Jobs Developing Sites for Users of Wireless Phones and PDA Devices"

by Richard Stooker, President Info Ring Press and author of Secrets of Changing to a Computer Career

WMLScript is the new scripting language for special web sites which are created especially for wireless devices such as mobile phones and PDAs. WMLScript is the JavaScript of wireless web pages.

WAP is the Wireless Application Protocol which is the overall set of ways that the wireless industry has put together to enable mobile phone users to access the Internet. WML is Wireless Markup Language and is the set of tags for marking up content to instruct wireless devices in how to display the web site's content on the user's cell phone.

WML is the wireless equivalent to HTML.

WMLScript is similar to JavaScript, VBScript and ECMAScript in that it enables the web user to actually do things with the site and interact with it. However, wireless web sites currently are much smaller and simpler, and so WMLScript is designed to work on these web sites.

It makes minimal demands on memory and CPU usage, since those things are limited on a wireless device. One way it does this is to eliminate a lot of functions you find in the other scripting languages, since they're simply not necessary or possible while using a wireless device.

Lots of libraries are pre-compiled and come already loaded in the user agent's memory, allowing for quick and easy access by WMLScript. The user agent is the particular wireless device.

This knowledge will become increasingly important for webmasters and designers. Right now, relatively few standard web sites are created with WMLScript. There are the standard web sites we are all used to, such as this one, and specialized ones especially for the wireless market.

WMLScript will grow in importance as wireless access to the Internet grows.

There are some technical differences, but WMLScript does look a lot like JavaScript and has been called a special dialect of JavaScript. Actually, it is more accurate to say it is based on ECMAScript, the scripting language (close to JavaScript) which is attempting to be the vendor-neutral scripting language standard of the Internet. It is NOT object oriented.

It has byte code and interpreter reference architecture to make optimal use of the current narrow bands of memory available to it. Unlike JavaScript, it compiles to byte code.

It does not support objects and methods or any application requiring heavy duty computing power, because cell phones just don't have it.

WML will grow in demand as more web owners realize that people are using handheld wireless devices to shop on the net, and will not want to miss out on that market.

Someday, using WML to design a wireless version of your web site, and WMLScript to enable user interaction, is going to be a standard part of designing web sites. I haven't gotten around to designing a WAP version of this site yet, but eventually I'm going to have to.

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