A WAP gateway sits between mobile devices using the

Wireless Application Protocol Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) is a technical standard for accessing information over a mobile wireless network. A WAP browser is a web browser for mobile devices such as mobile phones that use the protocol. Introduced in 1999, WAP achieve ...

(WAP) and the

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web se ...

, passing pages from one to the other much like a proxy. This translates pages into a form suitable for the mobiles, for instance using the

Wireless Markup Language Wireless Markup Language (WML), based on XML, is a now-obsolete markup language intended for devices that implement the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) specification, such as mobile phones. It provides navigational support, data input, hyp ...

(WML). This process is hidden from the phone, so it may access the page in the same way as a browser accesses HTML, using a URL (for example, http://example.com/foo.wml), provided the mobile phone operator has not specifically prevented this. WAP gateway software that encodes and decodes request and response between the smartphones, microbrowser and internet. It decodes the encoded WAP requests from the microbrowser and send the HTTP requests to the internet or to a local application server. It also encodes the WML and HDML data returning from the web for transmission to the microbrowser in the handset.

References

Kannel: Open Source WAP and SMS Gateway

What is WAP Gateway

Wap-Gateway.com: Free WAP Gateway / Wap Proxy
* http://www.squid-cache.org/ Wireless Application Protocol {{mobile-tech-stub