7.1 THE RISE OF THE WEB

The browsing paradigm made possible by HTTP and HTML has become a key mechanism for liberating digital information. A virtuous circle arose out of the universality of the browser, once its installation reached critical mass. More browsers in circulation heightened the appeal of offering services that could be accessed via the browser. Many applications and services have since become ‘web-enabled’. It is almost impossible to think of a desktop application that doesn't access the Internet in some way, even if only to check for software updates. Moreover, tools and software supporting HTTP have become so widespread that HTTP is a common protocol for many types of software systems, not just browser-based services.

As we have learnt in Chapter 5, HTTP can be used to gain access to any data on remote servers, including snippets of XML. If we combine these two capabilities then we have an effective mechanism for network-enabling mobile devices. As we shall discover in Chapter 11, software is now widespread to make HTTP easily accessible to programs running on mobile devices. This makes HTTP a useful backbone for mobile services. There are only two other protocols that are important: SIP and RTP. We shall discuss SIP and its uses fully in Chapter 14. We introduced the basic operation of RTP in Chapter 5. We shall not cover it in any more depth in this book because, despite its importance in enabling real-time media services on mobiles, it is not a generic protocol ...

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