Introduction

In today's contemporary world, whenever people talk about phones, it is taken for granted that they are referring to the normal land telephone. But, the day is not far when mobile phones will become as commonplace as the ubiquitous government peon. They will outnumber the normal phones by an overwhelming margin. This paradigm shift is already gaining momentum.

The Internet World has collapsed. There are more dotcoms perishing today than people. This acclivity in the mortality rate of the dotcoms can safely be attributed to the lack of monetary support from users of the Internet and poor revenue generation models of the dotcom firms.

In the world of mobile phones, people are favourably inclined towards paying for the content. This is because users are already spending abundantly for receiving calls and they don't mind paying a little extra for the value added services that are being offered by the mobile phone service providers.

As a result of this, the world of mobile phones is poised to experience explosive growth. This will increase the demand for content providers for the mobile phones. It is this niche of the software spectrum that will be addressed by programs written in WML and WMLScript. The demand for software professionals with knowledge of these programming languages will grow in direct proportion to the increase in the user base of mobile phones. Keeping this in mind, the need for a book on this subject was considered inescapable.

Acknowledgements

I take this opportunity to thank all the people who have been associated with this book and help me bring life to this book.

I am grateful to Harish Mehta, President TiE and CMD Onward Technologies for writing the foreword of the book.

Manish Jain, Publisher BPB, for publishing the book.

To my co-authors, Vishal and Sonal who have put in late hours and helped me complete this book.

Tanuja Sodhi, an ex-naval office from the first batch of lady officers and an MBA from JBIMS for editting the second section on ‘WMLScript’. She is presently freelancing as a creative writer.

Altaf Hemani and Kishore Rohra for designing the cover.

Manish Purohit for painstakingly working on the screens, formatting the text and aligning them.

Altaf, Kishore and Manish, for having successfully completed their WML based project ‘WAPTrack”.

Pradeep Mukhi and Shivanand Shetty have always been a source of inspiration and encouragement.

Finally, I cannot imagine how I would have completed this book without the encouragement and support I received from my family and close friends.

- Vijay Mukhi