Summary

The many unique characteristics of wireless Internet applications add complexity to the traditional Internet application development process: You have to worry about a variety of microbrowsers, multiple markup languages, and communicating over a variety of wireless protocols. Therefore, take extra care to design applications that can operate effectively on devices with small screen sizes and low bandwidth.

A variety of development tools and SDKs are available to help with the development of thin client applications. The majority of these products come with device emulation environments. Emulators allow application developers to build and test the applications on the same physical machine; they are not, however, intended to replace testing on physical devices over wireless networks.

In the next chapter we explore the various wireless languages and technologies available for generating wireless content.