Working on a website for my company, I discovered the need for wireless access to my email,
stocks and such. Not wanting to pay someone else to give me
this information, I decided to develop a wireless site. The information to do this is
available on the internet, but it is scattered and hard to come across. I needed
the ability to run php scripts, access databases, and other functions that I needed PHP to
do for me. This article covers the basics of wml, how to set up your apache server,
and php. Covering the basics allows you to set up this environment and then learn the rest
on your own.
Requirements
You will need a little experience with the Apache Web Server, Php and html. As for system
requirements,
I am using apache 1.3.9, php3, and Red Hat Linux 6.0 for this demonstration. I don't see
any problems with setting this up on a windows machine
running Apache, and PHP3 or PHP4.
In this article, I am going to walk you through the following areas; intro to wml,
setting up apache for wireless appications, and creating your first WML/PHP page.
Much of this information has been gathered from across the internet, and some I learned as
I tried to put together a working site.
Intro to WML
WML stands for Wireless Markup Language. WAP phone or similar devices are used to view
pages written in WML. WML is similar to XML based on it's syntax and scrictness. Anybody
who has used html will have no problem learning WML. Many tags and attributes are the same,
but there are fewer tags. WML allows the programmer to use variables that allow you to
create dynamic content, although for this article we are going to use php as the dynamic
language.
WML Basics
In WML you can use many sub-pages (called 'cards') in one WML page (called a 'deck').
Each WML card works like a web page and its content is displayed to the user. The following
will be our first example of a .wml page. On my server, I saved this file in
~/wireless/home.wml.
<wml> <card id='home'> <p> My first Test page </p> </card> </wml>
Unlike HTML, if you do not close your tags, e.g. <wml> </wml> then, your script will
not compile correctly. The example above will create a simple test message on any wireless
device that says "My first Test page".
Setting up Apache
Ok, now the fun part. In order for apache to catch what a wireless device visits your
server, you need to set up your httpd.conf ( my file is located in /etc/httpd/conf/ ) file, I am using PHP3 so all changes are made accordingly. Before you start you may want
to make a backup copy of your httpd.conf file, just in case :)
Step 1: First, we need to use the AddType function to add a new mime
type. You need to go to to the script where you define php. It looks something like below:
<IfModule mod_php3.c> AddType application/x-httpd-php3 .php3 .php .phtml AddType application/x-httpd-php3-source .phps </IfModule>
Needs to be changed to:
<IfModule mod_php3.c> AddType application/x-httpd-php3 .php3 .php .phtml .wml AddType application/x-httpd-php3-source .phps </IfModule>
This will use the php compiler on all .wml pages it encounters.
Step 2: Uncomment the apache Load Module and Add Module
change:
#LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so #AddModule mod_rewrite.c
to:
LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so AddModule mod_rewrite.c
Step 3: We'll use apache mod_rewrite module (only available in
version 1.2+ ). Using this, you can rewite requested URL's on the fly, as certain
conditions are met. You need to place this code snipplet at the bottom of the page.
RewriteEngine On
# Catch most WAP browsers
RewriteCond %{HTTP_ACCEPT} text/vnd\.wap\.wml [OR]
# WinWAP, WAPjag
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} wap [OR]
#Nokia emulators (sdk)
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} 7110
# Rewrite to where your wireless page is located
RewriteRule ^[\./](.*)$ /home/mydirectory/wireless/home.wml [L]
Now, you will need to restart the apache server.