Copyright © 2001 WorldCom, Inc.
The Wireless Communications Transfer Protocol (WCTP) has been created to provide a wireless industry specific standardized representation of messages that are sent between a wireline host and a wireless device or between two wireless devices. WCTP is a simple means of passing alphanumeric and binary messages between wireline systems and one- or two-way capable wireless devices. WCTP does not require that the wireless device be capable of responding. A one-way numeric pager would be equally as accessible as any device capable of bi-directional messaging. Although introduced through the paging industry, WCTP is directly applicable for messaging to and from most other wireless technologies including PCS, GSM, and cellular.
Information about WCTP, including the specification document for WCTP 1.1, can be found at http://www.wctp.org.
wctpXml offers C++ developers a class library to support generating WCTP requests and parsing WCTP responses expressed in XML. Building wctpXml creates a static library appropriate for your environment - WctpXml.lib (Visual C++) or libWctpXml.a (Linux) that provides you with a set of classes, wctpXmlXXXX, that encapsulate the operations supported in WCTP Version 1.1.
To submit suggestions or feedback on the wctpXml library, please email skytel-strategic-apps@wcom.com. To be notified about upcoming releases or other important information about the wctpXml library, please join the wctpXml mailing list. To join, send an email to skytel-strategic-apps@wcom.com with a subject line of ‘subscribe wctpXml’. To remove yourself from the mailing list, send an email to skytel-strategic-apps@wcom.com with a subject line of ‘unsubscribe wctpXml’.
wctpXml includes two example applications - wctpXMl_client for Linux, and w32Example for Windows (Win32 using Visual C++ 6.0).
wctpXml is freely available with source under a very liberal license (the Mozilla Public License Version 1.1). The expat library used as the non-validating XML parser is included here under its own license. The latest production version of wctpXml can be downloaded from either http://www.skytel.com/downloads/wctpxml/wctpxml_vc.zip or http://www.skytel.com/downloads/wctpxml/wctpxml_linux.zip, depending on the operating system to be used. This version of wctpXml has been built and tested with both Microsoft’s Visual C++ 6.0 under Windows 95/98 and GNU C++ version 2.96 under Redhat Linux 7 with a 2.2.16 kernel.
wctpXml uses James Clark’s non-validating XML parsing library, expat, to parse the WCTP/XML operations. wctpXml Version 1.0 was built using expat 1.2 (included in the release package). The latest production version of James Clark’s expat can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.jclark.com/pub/xml/expat.zip.
This is the first production version of wctpXml, which supports all of the wctp-Operation elements defined in WCTP 1.1. The following lists provide some assistance in determining which of the wctp-Operation elements a developer will need to implement based upon what kind of application or server is being built.
Unsolicited requests that a developer can expect to receive from a WCTP gateway:
§ wctp-MessageReply
§ wctp-StatusInfo
§ wctp-SubmitRequest
§ wctp-VersionQuery
Responses that a developer can return to a WCTP gateway:
§ wctp-Confirmation
§ wctp-StatusInfo
§ wctp-VersionResponse
Requests that a developer can make against a WCTP gateway:
§ wctp-ClientQuery
§ wctp-LookupSubscriber
§ wctp-MessageReply
§ wctp-PollForMessages
§ wctp-SubmitClientMessage
§ wctp-SubmitRequest
§ wctp-VersionQuery
Responses that a developer can expect to receive from a WCTP gateway:
§ wctp-ClientQueryResponse
§ wctp-Confirmation
§ wctp-LookupResponse
§ wctp-PollResponse
§ wctp-StatusInfo
§ wctp-SubmitClientResponse
§ wctp-VersionResponse