Wei Meng Lee

By now, of course, you've heard of WAP, or Wireless Application Protocol. Contrary to what some critics want you to believe, WAP doesn't stand for "Where Are the Phones?" Some analysts even coined the phrase "Wait And Participate." Whether WAP is here to stay is beyond the scope of this article, but with the influx of WAP-enabled devices from leading phone manufacturers, such as Motorola, Ericsson, and Nokia, the WAP market seems eager for a couple of killer applications. In this article I discuss the Wireless Markup Language used in WAP and show how you can build WAP applications using WML and its scripting counterpart, WMLScript. Wireless Markup Language WML is based on XML. What's important here is that different vendors can extend the language by specifying their own Document Type Definitions (DTDs). For example, Phone.com has extended the standard WML specifica... (more)

Programming The DOM Using MSXML 3.0

Part 1 of this article (XML-J, Vo1. 2, issue 3) introduced you to the Microsoft XML Parser Release 3.0 (MSXML3). We saw how an XML document can be transformed using XSLT, and how the parser can be used to validate XML documents. Now, we'll begin a journey into the more technical aspects of MSXML3. First I'll discuss how XML documents can be programmatically manipulated using the Document Object Model (DOM). (Part 3 will deal with a competing technique known as SAX [Simple API for XML].) Why do we need to manipulate an XML document? You've seen the structure of such a document, ... (more)

Equipping PDAs and PCs with Bluetooth

One technology that's hot these days is undoubtedly Bluetooth. Named after the Danish King Harald Bluetooth (who ruled from approximately A.D. 940-985, and is reported to have united Denmark and Norway), Bluetooth is a short-range radio wave wireless technology operating in the 2.4GHz frequency spectrum. With an operating range of 30 feet (10 meters) and a maximum transmission rate of a mere 1Mbps, Bluetooth is widely touted as the "cable replacement" solution. This means that in the near future you may not need any cables to connect your keyboard and mouse to the PC, and you'll... (more)

Programming The SAX2 3.0 Using MSXML

While DOM provides a flexible way of manipulating elements in an XML document, it can be quite costly when the XML source document is large. Remember, DOM reads an XML document from a disk and builds the elements as nodes in a tree in memory. The costs involved in reading the file and maintaining a copy of it in the main memory may not be feasible if you want to retrieve only the value of one or two elements. As such, the Simple API for XML (SAX) has been promoted as a better alternative in programmatically manipulating XML documents. What Is SAX? SAX is simply an interface for ... (more)

Creating Web Services with the Microsoft SOAP Toolkit

Microsoft recently released the beta 1 of the SOAP Toolkit for Visual Studio version 2.0. While the new release still has some rough spots, the toolkit has provided developers with an easy way to deploy Web Services, especially for those running on the Windows platform. Version 2 of the SOAP toolkit contains some drastic changes from its earlier version. Developers familiar with version 1 of the toolkit will know that it uses the Remote Object Proxy Engine (ROPE) for consuming Web Services and the Web Service Description Language (WSDL) to define the contract for the Web service.... (more)