Tools for Mobile Web Development - Openwave

published by Dan in Tools & Resources | Web Development | Web Technology with No Comments

I have been discussing mobile web development for the last several posts. We’ve discussed the nature of mobile web design and its limitations, mobile web protocols, and markup languages. What first-time mobile web developers will find out though is that testing can be quite a pain when designing a mobile website. Just a little problem with your code will apparently yield no results. You need your code to be perfectly right (no missing closing tags or you’re in trouble) just so the results will be displayed. To make life a whole lot easier for you make sure you have a WAP simulator which you can use to test your code without having to load your webpage into a mobile phone.

Openwave Phone Simulator is so far the easiest simulator to install. Openwave Phone Simulator can be downloaded for free at Openwav’es website although registration is compulsory. The latest version of the simulator (version 7.0) has a “dual stack” configuration, which means that the single executable contains both the WAP and HTTP versions of the browser. It also features a “proxy-less” communication so you don’t need to connect to the internet using a gateway. For those who are currently using old versions of Openwave note that you will need to uninstall it before installing version 7.

Openwave is really very easy to use requiring you to simply type in the URL of your current website. It will then retrieve the webpage for you and from there allow you to configure the webpages according to your liking. Since it simulates the entire phone you can actually use all the access keys that phones have.

The bad news for non-Windows developers is that it only runs on Windows.

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