1 Introduction to Oracle Application Server Wireless

1.3.1 Multi-Channel Server

At the core of OracleAS Wireless is the Multi-Channel Server, enabling applications to be accessed through multiple delivery methods such as SMS, voice access, WAP, Pocket PCs, and others. Multi-Channel Server greatly simplifies and reduces the time and cost of development by acting as an intelligent wireless proxy for applications. Developers need not be concerned with the vast array of mobile devices and networks; they can now focus on creating applications for any channel in one, future-proof, open-standards language. The new Multi-Channel Server extends the existing multi-channel capabilities of previous OracleAS Wireless releases.

Applications written in XHTML are passed through the Multi-Channel Server and translated for any device and network. For example, an XHTML application passed through the Multi-Channel Server is translated to VoiceXML if a phone is calling the application using a voice dialog, or it is translated to WML if a WAP phone is accessing the application.

1.3.2 J2ME Support

Oracle J2ME Developer's Kit offers the ability to extend web services to J2ME devices in an optimized manner for mobile devices.

Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME), provides a lightweight operating system for mobile devices enabling open standards, client-side development. With the large amount of J2ME-enabled phones on the market, vendors need a method to efficiently build, manage and deliver J2ME applications to the right mobile devices. OracleAS Wireless includes complete, end-to-end support for building J2ME applications and delivering them to mobile devices. J2ME support includes the J2ME Developer's Kit and the J2ME Provisioning system.

However, there is a restriction on the complexity of J2ME applications because of the limited computing power of mobile devices. The more complicated the J2ME application is, the less usable the application will be on a device. One way to create compelling J2ME applications is to use Web services. Applications are able to push some of the CPU-intensive logic to the Web services residing on the server side. Even the call to Web services from J2ME devices is too CPU-intensive. Using the J2ME Developer's Kit, J2ME application developers can make web services calls through the Oracle Application Server J2ME proxy server using a client stub. Additionally, MIDlet developers can utilize built-in features optimizing communication, such as request and response caching, if the network is unavailable. The calls then can automatically resume when network connectivity is restored.

In order to deploy a J2ME application, OracleAS Wireless streamlines the deployment, management and delivery of J2ME applications with its provisioning system. Web-based application management allows users to upload J2ME applications for management and secure storage. A byte-code inspector verifies the application for any malicious content. OracleAS Wireless supports over-the-air (OTA), and efficiently delivers applications to target users or devices. Digital Rights Management (DRM) adds a digital layer around J2ME applications to support business logic that provides full control over the application. The digital wrapper supports billing strategies and application life span control.

1.3.3 Notifications and Multimedia Messaging

OracleAS Wireless further enhances messaging with new functionality for actionable alerts, message adaptation, and failover delivery control. Also new are MMS features that allow for richer messaging experiences. Existing messaging capabilities have been enhanced to include more flexible message templates, security to prevent message spoofing, support for message prioritization, and a greater ability to handle volume notifications.

OracleAS Wireless supports Multimedia Messaging (MMS) for rich mobile messages including graphics, videos and audio. MMS messages can be authored natively in SMIL or in open-standards XHTML. Messages authored in XHTML are automatically adapted for MMS-compatible devices by OracleAS Wireless. The power of adaptation allows a message to be written once and automatically optimized for any target device.

Actionable alerts are notifications you can respond to from your mobile device. For example, a stock alert can prompt a user to take an action and sell when a target price is hit.

Location can also trigger an alert. Location-based alerts generate and deliver alert messages based on a mobile user's current location. For example, a field service coordinator receives an alert when a service engineer is within two miles of a customer with an urgent service request.

Also new to the Multi-Channel Server are Multimedia Adaptation Services. OracleAS Wireless Multimedia Adaptation Services provide device-specific adaptation of images, ringtones, voice grammars and audio/video streams. Devices support different image formats and have different screen sizes and color depths. As part of the content adaptation performed by OracleAS Wireless in responding to a request, images are dynamically adapted to suit the device. Ringtone adaptation allows for conversion of ringtone data to formats supported by the most popular phones such as RTTTL, iMelody and MIDI. The flexible framework for ringtone adaptation allows developers to easily add support for new ringtone formats.

1.3.4 Wireless Development Kit

The Oracle Wireless Development Kit is a small-footprint OracleAS Wireless development environment for developing wireless and voice applications. This speeds the development process by giving extra flexibility to use any IDE, development tool, Web service and/or device simulator. The Wireless Development Kit can be used on any PC or laptop, connected or disconnected, to build and test wireless and voice applications. It is no longer necessary to have a full installation of Oracle Application Server on which to build and test wireless applications. The Wireless Development Kit supports development for voice, mobile browser, J2ME and messaging applications.

Oracle offers a version of the Wireless Development Kit specifically for JDeveloper called the JDeveloper Wireless Extension. JDeveloper users can utilize the JDeveloper Wireless Extension for complete wireless development with code templates, wizards, code insight and automatic deployment to Oracle Application Server.

1.3.5 Web Clipping

The Wireless Web Clipping Server allows clipping and scraping of existing Web content to create wireless applications that reuse your existing PC browser-based applications. The Wireless Web Clipping Server is used to create many applications, each of which represents Web content that has been clipped and scraped from one or more Web sites scattered throughout a large organization.

Wireless Web Clipping Server includes:

• Navigation through various styles of login mechanisms, including form and JavaScript-based submission and HTTP Basic and Digest Authentication with cookie-based session management.

• Fuzzy matching of clippings. If a Web clipping gets reordered within the source page or if its character font, size, or style changes, it will be identified correctly by the Wireless Web Clipping Server and delivered as the Wireless Web Clipping application content.

• Reuse of a wide range of Web content, including basic support of pages written with HTML 4.0.1, JavaScript, applets, and plug-in enabled content, retrieved through HTTP GET and POST (form submission).

All Wireless Web Clipping application definitions are stored persistently in the Oracle Application Server infrastructure database. Any secure information, such as passwords, is stored in encrypted form, according to the Data Encryption Standard (DES), using Oracle encryption technology.

1.3.6 Location Services

OracleAS Wireless Location Services give access to the full Location-Based Service (LBS) functionality, such as user positioning, geocoding, mapping, driving directions, and business directory lookup in an open-standards manner. Any application or generic client can use the included WSDLs to invoke the LBS web services. In addition, OracleAS Wireless instances can use LBS features more conveniently by using the service provider proxy. This allows you to switch LBS providers without having to make modifications to the applications using LBS features.

LBS features have been made available through the OracleAS Wireless tools in addition to being available through APIs. The LBS features allow mobile positioning (to provide the user's current location, and privacy management) to control when and to whom a mobile user's location is available. Both mobile positioning and the caching of the location information can be enabled or disabled by the system or by individual users. Users can grant mobile positioning access to other users or groups of users (communities) for a certain date range and for specified time windows.

OracleAS Wireless Location Services also allows a mobile user/device to send the current location, which is usually provided by a GPS receiver, to OracleAS Wireless. The current location can be subsequently queried through the existing mobile positioning and privacy management framework. Users can also choose to position themselves manually using the Location Mark feature. A Location Mark can be either a point location specified by an address or a region specified by a city, state, or country.

In the previous release, users could configure multiple content providers for geocoding, mapping, driving directions, and business directory services, and a provider was selected based on static ordering or its availability region. This release adds the ability to monitor the performance and reliability of providers and dynamically adjust the selection criteria. It also logs performance statistics that will help administrators manage their systems.