The primary means of communicating information of these days are voice and Internet. The unlimited accesses to Internet and sheer number of people connected to the Internet have made industry captain realize its potential. The industry now plans its marketing and communication strategies around the Internet. Today every banking to education, research to health-care is affected by it. E-mail is the way to communicate today. Practically who use the Internet uses E-mail.

The wireless technologies and the Internet were growing separately. The wireless industry initially struggled within a number of issues like low bandwidth and low connection stability, to bring Internet to its users. They came together to form a common forum to tackle these issues. This forum is called the WAP. The wireless application protocol.

Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) is a result of continuous work to define an industry-wide specification for developing applications that operate over wireless communication networks. The scope for the WAP Forum is to define market is growing very quickly and reaching new customers and providing new services. To enable operators and manufacturers to meet the challenges in advanced services, differentiation, and fast/flexible service creation, WAP defines a set of protocols in transport, session and application layers. 

WAP As An Extension of the Internet model

The WAP model closely resembles the Internet model of working. In Internet a WWW client requests a resource stored on a web server by identifying it using a unique URL, that is, a text string constituting an address to that resource. WAP client applications make requests very similar in concept to the URL concept in use on the Web.Standard communication protocols, like HTTP and Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) manage these requests and transfer of data between the two ends. The content that is transferred can either be static like html pages or dynamic like Active Server Pages (ASP), Common Gateway Interface (CGI), and Servlets.