LYU0001 Wireless-based Mobile E-Commerce on the Web

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LYU0001Wireless-based MobileE-Commerce on the
Web

• Supervisor Prof. Michael R. Lyu
• Prepared By Wat Hong Fai, Tony
• Yan Wai Keung, Harris

Final Year Project Presentation, Fall 2000 The
Chinese University of Hong Kong Department of
Computer Science and Engineering
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Outline

• Background information on wireless access
• WAP basics
• WAP limitations
• Future of WAP
• Project objectives and details
• Project implementations
• Problems encountered
• Future plans
• Information related to future plans

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From Wired to Wireless

• International Data Corp (IDC) predicts
• mid 2001 - all mobile phones shipped in the world
  will be WAP-capable
• the end of 2002 - more wireless subscribers
  capable of Internet access than wired Internet
  users
• When this happens, web masters may first consider
  the needs of the wireless users and secondly, the
  wired PC users

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WAP

• Wireless Application Protocol (WAP)
• An open, global specification developed by WAP
  Forum
• Based on already existing Internet protocols
• Optimized for mobile users with wireless devices

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WAP Architecture

• Traditional web server (such as Apache, IIS) can
  host pages for WAP
• Wireless Markup Language (WML) is functionally
  equivalent to HTML
• Pages designed for WAP (either static or
  dynamically generated) should be in WML format

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WAP Architecture (2)

• WAP Gateway is an intermediary between the
  Internet and the mobile network
• Translates mobile device requests (WAP requests)
  into HTTP requests
• Redirects the web-server's HTTP responses to the
  mobile device

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WAP Limitation

• Designed with constraints
• Small display
• Limited input facilities
• Narrow bandwidth of network connection
• Limited memory
• Insufficient computational resources

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WAP Limitation (2)

• Narrow bandwidth 9.6kbps
• Maximum size of each deck 1.4 Kbytes
• Only text and monochrome images (.wbmp) are
  supported

GIF format on web
WBMP format on WAP
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Future of WAP

• Recently, WAP(version 1.2) is based on GSM, CDMA
  or TDMA networks (2G)
• General Packet Radio Service (GPRS)
• Uses packet switched data transmission
• Faster speed (115 kbps) and better application
  can be developed. E.g. Multimedia applications
• Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS)
  
• Internet-based packet data, up to 2 Mbps
• It will make video conferencing possible

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Project Objectives and Aims

• Our project is to explore the world of e-commerce
  in it's beginning age of moving to the wireless
  world
• Design and Develop a WAP-based E-Commerce
  application on the Web
• Accessible with WAP-enabled device such as mobile
  phone and PDAs

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Project Details

• A Second hand market application is to be built
  for real-time interaction, purchasing and
  transaction with payment
• Posting products for sell or to request for
• Real-time buyer-seller interaction to bargain for
  the price
• Real-time purchasing and transaction by credit
  card

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Project Implementations

• Hardware Platform
• Windows NT Server 4.0 with IIS 4
• Programming Language
• PHP
• Database
• MySQL

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Browsing Products

• Products are categorized by type

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User Registration

• Users should register for an account before
  selling and requesting products

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Login

• Session ID is generated for each user login
  session, propagates through pages

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Profile Management

• Modify personal profile (e.g. password, bank
  account, credit card number)

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Selling and Requesting
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Giving Response

• When users are attracted by a product or request,
  they response with giving price and leaving a
  message

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Check Status

• Check to see if anyone response to the users
  posting

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Problems Encountered

• Department Firewall
• WAP simulator (used to test WML pages) cannot
  connect to WAP gateway
• Online simulator is used instead
• Perl with Oracle
• Many efforts put into installing Perl to connect
  to Department Oracle server, but without success
• Switch to use open source PHP and MySQL

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Future Plans

• Current implementation use two sets of programs
  to generate HTML and WML pages
• XML and XSL can help to reduce duplication of
  programming efforts

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XML and XSL

• eXtensible Markup Language (XML)
• A meta language used to define other domain- or
  industry-specific languages
• No fixed set of elements
• eXtensible Stylesheet Language (XSL)
• A language for transforming XML documents
• A description of how to present the transformed
  information
• eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations
  (XSLT) describes a transformation vocabulary

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Application of XML and XSL

• Separate interface design from content
  development
• Program query database only once and present the
  data in XML format
• One XSL document is used to transform the XML
  data into HTML document
• Another XSL document is used to transform the XML
  data into WML document

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How XML and XSL Works

• More views can be added by providing more XSL
  documents

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Summary

• E-Commerce development is now shifting from wired
  computers to wireless mobile devices
• WAP will take major role in future E-Commerce
  applications
• Familiar with traditional means of building a
  E-Commerce site
• Explore alternative method in supporting
  interface of both Web and WAP.
• XML and XSL will be one of the approaches
  suitable for this kind of application

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Thank You