Mobilize Your Web Site the Easy Way

[Author's Note: Each month, this column discusses various aspects of the advanced administration of e-business sites. This month, I show you how to install, configure, and use an Internet Server API (ISAPI) filter on your IIS sites that will immediately provide wireless capabilities.]

Designing, developing, and implementing wireless Web applications is difficult and tedious. Software developers have difficulty maintaining a public Web site that's compatible with all the different Web browsers while still exploiting the unique features of each browser. To add to the complexity, the popularity of wireless Web applications has skyrocketed—along with the more than 1000 devices (all with slightly different capabilities and features) that have come with this explosion.

Developers wrote first-generation wireless Web applications to support one device: a particular Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) such as Compaq's iPAQ Pocket PC that runs Microsoft Pocket Internet Explorer on Windows CE or a cellular telephone that has Wireless Markup Language. WML, formerly called Handheld Device Markup Language (HDML), is the markup language designed for cellular telephones and PDA capabilities. WML is similar to HTML, but it's XML based, which gives it a more rigid structure. Developers write applications to support one device because maintaining multiple code bases to support more than one device is so difficult. Just keeping up with all the nuances in rendering capabilities for one device is an almost impossible task for software developers.

So, would you be surprised if I told you that there's a product for IIS that automatically converts the HTML that IIS sends from your Web applications into the proper wireless format of the device that's connected to your IIS server? Well, the product's name is Echo, and Wireless Knowledge (a Microsoft-QUALCOMM partnership) produces it. Echo is an ISAPI filter that determines the type and capability of the wireless Internet device that has connected to your IIS Web server. When IIS renders HTML, this outbound ISAPI filter intercepts it and converts it to the proper format of the connecting device. Put another way, when IIS receives a request for data from a Web-enabled mobile device, Echo determines what type of markup language the device requires and instantly translates the HTML output of your Web application into that markup language (e.g., HTML for Palm, HTML for Pocket PC, WML or HDML for cellular telephones).

The process is that simple. The burden on your Web applications is negligible because Echo simply converts HTML on its way out. Echo isn't like an Active Server Pages (ASP) engine with an interpreter or a compiler that requires significant CPU and disk time. By custom-rendering the data after your application has delivered the HTML and just before IIS sends the data to the mobile device, Echo stays out of the application itself. The best news is that Wireless Knowledge has a large team of engineers, testers, and quality-assurance people who keep current on the capabilities of new wireless Internet devices as they enter the market so that you don't have to keep up with every device.

Installing and Configuring Echo
Echo supports IIS 4.0 or later. You use an installation wizard in a Windows Installer (.msi) file to install Echo. When you run the wizard, Echo checks your system for compatibilities. If Echo doesn't find problems, the license agreement appears. If Echo finds problems (e.g., an old version of the Microsoft XML Parser—MSXML), it recommends solutions. (No compatibility problems exist in a default installation of IIS 5.0 on Windows 2000.)

Simply follow the wizard's prompts to complete the installation. The installation documentation and Wireless Knowledge support are excellent, so count on them if you have questions or trouble.

After you install Echo, putting it to use is simple. Open the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) Internet Information Services snap-in (or the MMC Internet Information Server snap-in in Windows NT 4.0). Navigate to the site on which you want to run Echo. Right-click that site, then select Properties. Notice that Echo installation has added a Mobility tab, which Figure 1 shows, to the Web server's Properties dialog box. To turn on wireless capability for the entire site, simply select the Enable mobility check box.

However, you don't have to enable mobility for your entire Web site. Like most properties in IIS, mobility is inherited. If you turn on mobility for the entire Web site, each virtual directory, folder, and file beneath that site inherits the mobility setting. You can also navigate to a virtual directory or folder, right-click it, and select Properties. In this way, you can enable mobility at a more granular level.

   Previous  [1]  2  Next