The Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) is the de-facto world standard for the presentation and delivery of wireless information and telephony services on mobile phones and other wireless terminals. Handset manufacturers representing 90 percent of the world market across all technologies have committed to shipping WAP-enabled devices.

Enabling information access from handheld devices requires a deep understanding of both technical and market issues that are unique to the wireless environment. The WAP specification was developed by the industry’s best minds to address these issues. Wireless devices represent the ultimate constrained computing device with limited CPU, memory, and battery life, and a simple user interface. Wireless networks are constrained by low bandwidth, high latency, and unpredictable availability and stability. However, most important of all, wireless subscribers have a different set of essential desires and needs than desktop or even laptop Internet users.

WAP allows carriers to strengthen their service offerings by providing subscribers with the information they want and need while on the move. Infrastructure vendors will deliver the supporting network equipment. Application developers and content providers delivering the value added services are contributing to the WAP specification.

There are two distinct areas of work in mobility: mobile computing, concerning computation that is carried out in mobile devices (laptops, personal digital assistants, etc.), and mobile computation, concerning mobile code that moves between devices (applets, agents, etc.).

Mobile devices are computing devices that are operational and operated while on the move.

Commercially available ultra-mobile devices comprise most notably personal digital assistants (PDA), handheld PCs and mobile phones. These devices are designed to support users in different environments and different situations.

A fourth generation programming language is designed with specific purpose in mind such as the development of commercial software. The process of software development had been much improved with modern block structured third generation programming language, but it was still frustrating, slow, and error prone to program computers. This led to the first "programming crisis", in which the amount of work that might be assigned to programmers greatly exceeded the amount of programmer time available to do it.

All 4GLs are designed to reduce:

• programming effort.

• the time it takes to develop software.

• the cost of software development.

A number of different types of 4GLs exist:

• Report generators take a description of the data format and the report to generate and from that they either generate the required report directly or they generate a program to generate the report.

• Similarly forms generators manage online interactions with the application system users or generate programs to do so.

Some 4GLs have integrated tools, which allow for the easy specification of all the required information.

Examples

• Database query languages:

• SQL

• Oracle SQL*Plus

• Progress 4GL

• Report Generators:

• Oracle Reports

• LINC

• GEMBase

ERP vendors provide software that could integrate functions or departments within the enterprise smoothly. Different modules are designed and developed for different departments, which theoretically improved the productivity multifold and almost always assured return of investment (ROI) immediately.

The short-range wireless technology market is witnessing a number of technologies fighting for supremacy. Bluetooth is a high-speed, low-power microwave wireless link technology, designed to connect phones, laptops, PDAs and other portable equipment together with little or no work by the user. Unlike infrared, Bluetooth does not require line-of-sight positioning of connected units. The technology uses modifications of existing wireless LAN techniques, but is most notable for its small size and low cost. Whenever any Bluetooth-enabled devices come within range of each other, they instantly transfer address information and establish small networks between each other, without the user being involved. 

Biometrics is defined as the statistical analysis of biological observations and human phenomena. Biometric authentication is the measurement of a unique biological feature used to verify the claimed identity of an individual. The biological feature may be based on either:

• A physiological characteristic such as your fingerprint or face.

• A behavioral characteristic such as your signature or voice.

Numeric identification in the form of PINs is still todays most widely used security feature. However, biometrics adds a more profound level of security in that it cannot be stolen or lost. In addition, it enables an organization to authenticate the user as opposed to a piece of information (PIN) or a piece of equipment (dedicated equipment)

Web services, in the general meaning of the term, are services offered by one application to other applications via the World Wide Web. Clients of these services can aggregate them to form an end-user application, enable business transactions, or create new Web services.  

A web service is a software application accessible on the web through an URL, that is accessed by clients using XML-based protocols, such as SOAP sent over accepted internet protocols, such as HTTP. Clients access a web service application through its interfaces and bindings, which are defined using XML artifacts, such as a WSDL file.

The webservices computing paradigm enables applications and services running on different platforms to easily communicate and interoperate with each other.

The key unique idea behind JDO is to provide database persistence in Java with a minimum of extra stuff for the programmer to do. The programmer doesn’t need to learn SQL, doesn’t need to tediously copy data into and out of their Java objects using JDBC calls, and can use Java classes, fields, and references in a way that is natural to them, without lots of extra method calls and coding that is extraneous to the programmer’s focus and intend. Even queries can be written using Java predicates instead of SQL.

JDO provides transparent persistence of your Java object models in transactional data stores. It allows us to define your object model using all the capabilities provided in Java and it handles the mapping of that data to a variety of underlying data stores. We don’t need to learn and understand a different data-modeling language like SQL.

The Jakarta Struts project, an open-source project sponsored by Apache Software Foundation, is a server-side Java implementation of Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern.

The Struts project was designed with the intention of providing an open-source framework for creating Web applications that easily separate the presentation layer and allow it to be abstracted from the transaction and data layers. 

The framework is called “Struts” to remind us of the invisible underpinnings that hold up our houses, buildings, bridges, and indeed, ourselves when we are on stilts. This is an excellent description of the role Struts plays in developing web applications. When raising physical structures, construction engineers use struts to provide support for each floor of a building. Likewise, software engineers use Struts to support each layer of a business application.