WAP-G: a case study in mobile entertainment

WAP-G represents a recent (4.Qrt 2000) real-life case study dealing with the practical aspects of large scale mobile entertainment services as currently prototyped by European Internet service providers. Software platforms for mobile entertainment services, e.g., interactive multiplayer games or profile based personal matching using real-time geographical information, are facing a number of software-technical challenges, with respect to both reliability and scalability. We provide a brief outline of the requirements for the WAP-G platform and focus on two technical key issues in the context of interactive multiplayer WAP games: maintaining consistent user session and game state information in the presence of unreliable WAP connections and device independent output generation and transformation for not fully standardized WML end user devices. The former issue has been dealt with by running an array of server-side Mealy-style state machines yielding a consistent game state database used for session and game recovery in the presence of flapping WAP connections. The latter has been met by using an XML-style intermediate output representation based on a WML DTD in such a way that XML output generation and translation happens as a side effect of state transitions in the above mentioned state machines.