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Help on: Passing Input Between Webpages


murderboy

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My school has an online Information/Registration System where a student can login, check his grades, enlist subjects, etc.. (And it's called CRSIS! go figure.) For the Philippines, believe me that's CUTTING EDGE! :) I want to make it more accessible by making a wap cousin of it. The first step is passing the login data from the wap site to the main student login page. Anyone who can help me? Much appreciated! Thanks! :)*The second step would be a way to read the text data from the page and convert it to WAP. :mellow:

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Wow. That sure sounds like fun. I haven't seen this anywhere in Bulgaria yet, so I'd say that's cutting edge for us too.Is the main page an XHTML page? If so, you can use XSLT to convert it to WML (WAP). You'll need to have a server with an S3L (see my sig) support that will use the XSLT to generate the WML from the XHTML page of the original, and then give the phone the result.I find the situation with authentication a little harder though. If it uses sesssions (i.e. if it has a nice login screen on the web page instead of an ugly grey screen appearing to ask you for a username and password), then you'll also need a way to preserve session information from the main server to your server and to the client, making things MUCH more difficult.It would be a lot easier if you are allowed to edit the main application. You can make it (the main application) detect if the device is (X)HTML enabled, and if not, check if it's WAP enabled and give devices WAP in this case. The main application itself is still responsible for the security, and you save yourself the convertion, as you directly generate WML instead of converting XHTML to it.

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EDIT: Thanks for taking the time!Lol. I read your profile. 18 yrs old.. I envy your know-how. :mellow: Anyway...I checked it with the w3shools Markup Validation Service to see if it's xhtml. The student login page, which was .jsp, contained 10 errors, while the main page contained 76 errors. :)Here.. You can check out the website: crs(dot)upv(dot)edu(dot)phit actually shows the ip address. --- Doesn't that make it vulnerable??It's not even online all the time, so say my classmates. :wub:*It's not xhtml*It uses sessions*Does WML have commands for accessing databases? Probably MySQL. I'm thinking this would be easier since I wouldn't have to be passing the data or worrying about the session. I guess... :wub:*It really needs to be converted to a low bandwidth version if it's gonna be in WAP coz in our developing (read: third world :)) country, they charge per KB downloaded so..BTW, I am posting on the right subforum, right?

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We have a system like this at our school but the IT department failed to link the application's user database to the school's and as a result anyone who wants to use it has to go to IT and request an account :)

it actually shows the ip address. --- Doesn't that make it vulnerable??
No, there are other ways of finding an IP address.
*Does WML have commands for accessing databases? Probably MySQL. I'm thinking this would be easier since I wouldn't have to be passing the data or worrying about the session. I guess...
(As far as I know) you can you PHP on WAP so all standard functions that come with PHP apply to WML as well. However, you will still need the sessions for authentication purposes (unless the user re-authenticates at every page!).
*It really needs to be converted to a low bandwidth version if it's gonna be in WAP coz in our developing (read: third world) country, they charge per KB downloaded so.
Per kilobyte? erk. Well, as long as you can access all the sources that the original application accesses you can even build a completely new version tailored for mobile devices.
BTW, I am posting on the right subforum, right?
In lieu of a WAP forum then I suppose so... though further threads will of course appear in other forums if necessary.I suppose the most important question is can you modify it, because if you can't then this may be hard.
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*It's not xhtml
Bad. Very bad. It would be VERY hard, almost impossible to screenscrap any page that is so hardly mailformed. If it was at least a valid HTML 4.0, you could have parsed it with PHP's DOMDocument::loadHTMLFile() function, but with so many errors, the results, if any, can be unpredictable.
*It uses sessions
Worse. Unless you can edit the main application, you need to devise your own way of preserving the authentication data, which makes creating the application harder, and also more risky.
*Does WML have commands for accessing databases? Probably MySQL. I'm thinking this would be easier since I wouldn't have to be passing the data or worrying about the session. I guess... :)
WML is just an HTML alternative for representation on OLD mobile devices (newer ones support HTML and XHTML; JavaScript support still varies). Does (X)HTML have "commands" for accessing DBs? I sure don't know of such... and so WML doesn't have either.Whatever the case, you still need a server with some S3L that will generate the WML, not leave the phone deal with the WML generation.
*It really needs to be converted to a low bandwidth version if it's gonna be in WAP coz in our developing (read: third world :)) country, they charge per KB downloaded so..
During the generation, you can easily strip everything, leaving only what you want to be in the page. That should be obvious.I suggest you contact the administrator and ask him to make a WAP version, or on the very least, make a valid XHTML version with an HTTP authentication option. If he can't bother making a WAP variant, providing the other two things will make it possible for you to make a WAP version. Note that this application will perform better if it's on the same machine (read: IP), but in a different place (read: subdomain or folder).
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Alright thanks to both of you. I already contacted them and I even suggested to my adviser, who knows them personally, that I help in (manually) converting the site to XHTML. Sadly, they'll be needing many many papers signed many many times just to authorize it. Talk about tech savvy. I'd be a graduate by the time they get it authorized.I'll just forget about it for now but I'll read up on HTTP authentication and S3L, not to mention learn from their mistakes. I'm sure I can use these for my evil schemes... er.. future plans. Thanks!EDIT: What's S3L? I can't google it.

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EDIT: What's S3L? I can't google it.
As I said in my first post "see my sig". "sig" as in "signature". It's my own acronym. PHP and JSP both fall under it, though after I googled it now, it seems Sun Microsystems (the creators of JAVA and thus JSP) have a library called like that.Know that even when it becomes a valid XHTML, actually creating a WAP version would still be hard unless they can do it and/or allow you to at least read the database. If they don't, preserving the authentication information would be a great challenge.
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Right. heheh.. *scratches head* sorry. I got distracted by your XSLT2Processor and Gobby links. Checked them both out, both were cool, didn't come back to this topic for another 2 days!Thanks for all the answers, I'll be studying these from now on and then I'll be posting some problems I encounter on this subforum but on another topic. So... Thanks again and THREAD CLOSED. :)

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