Application architecture (long post - sorry)

[limeydrink at hotmail.com]

Hello Mike,

Thanks for the response.

And yeah, you're right, after a bit of investigation I found you can
pay for an unlimited mobile data usage and it's not that expensive so
thanks for prompting me.

Ok then, web it is, just wondering how you can test the web application
while developing and how do you find out the capabilities of the
browser, I now have browsed WAP pages on my Windows smartphone, is
there any difference to developing a WAP/WML solution to a HTML -
obviously it's in a different markup language, but is there anything
else that is needed between the client and the webserver ?

I have only ever played at web development in the past and I used MS
Active Server Pages and this seemed pretty straightforward, I know you
can use Python as the scripting language for ASP but I want something
platform neutral, so I was wondering if anyone could suggest some
similar framework for Python on both Linux and Windows.

Thanks again.

Mike Meyer wrote:
> limeydrink at hotmail.com writes:
>
> > In response to Mike's post...
> >
> > I know exactly where you're coming from and you are right a web based
> > solution is the simplest and would be the fastest to develop and
> > rollout etc. but..
> >
> > The cost is in the data, in the uk you get charged for the amount of
> > data you send/receive  by GPRS and this data you are paying for would
> > ideally be useful data and not the HTML to present it.
>
> I'll take your word for it that you don't have GPRS providers in the
> UK that have an all-you-can eat plan. They all do in the US.
>
> However, HTML doesn't *have* to be the bloated crap that seems to be
> produced by most designers - more more accurately, by the GUI tools
> they use to produce HTML. Used properly, it can be a very sparse
> encoding system. Not as good something designed for the data at hand,
> and not as good a binary format, but not awful, either.
>
> Further, you may be able to save bandwidth by putting some of the HTML
> on the mobile device. For example, the form your field engineers fill
> in to note that a job has been done could be kept on the PDA (assuming
> it's static), and just opened in the browser, filled in, and
> submitted. Palm did this with their PQA technology - a PQA was a set
> of HTML files that were "compiled" into a representation their browser
> understood.
>
> Finally, if the data bandwidth is really a serious problem, you might
> want to look into a solution at a different level. For instance, if
> you're using a VPN to get to your internal network, some VPN
> technologies include facilities to compress the data traveling across
> the network. That will reduce the difference in bandwidth usage
> between the various encoding formats you might consider.
>
>         <mike
> --
> Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org>			http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/
> Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information.