Until now, the Internet has been largely based upon simple protocols. However, the era of simple protocols is now over. The new Internet reality is that of wireless networks, providing service to legions of miniaturized, hand-held mobile devices. This reality places an entirely new set of requirements on the underlying communications protocols: they must now provide the power efficiency demanded by hand-held wireless devices, together with the bandwidth efficiency demanded by wide area wireless networks.
It is now time for a new generation of protocols to be implemented, designed to address the need for performance, rather than simplicity.
The industry-wide adoption of this new generation of powerful and efficient protocols will have enormous consequences. Protocols addressing the correct requirements will become the lynchpin of a huge new industry. The stakes are enormous, and ferocious competition is to be expected within all segments of the industry. All manner of wild claims and misrepresentations are also to be expected. At the time of writing, the main claimant to the protocol throne is the Wireless Applications Protocol, or WAP. However, WAP will eventually prove to be entirely inadequate to the role being claimed for it.
We have designed a set of protocols, the Lightweight & Efficient Application Protocols, or LEAP, which we believe is destined to displace WAP and become the de facto industry standard. These protocols, published as Internet RFC 2524 and RFC 2188, are designed to address all the technical requirements of the industry, and are oriented towards providing the greatest benefit to the industry and the consumer.
This manifesto is about our vision of the future of the Mobile and Wireless Applications Industry. In the remainder of the manifesto we present the details of our vision, and we justify our claims. We justify our assertion that the industry needs a new generation of protocols, we explain why our protocols fulfil this need, and we describe how and why these protocols will achieve dominance.
The protocols are free, open and in place. Open-source software implementations of the protocols are available for all major platforms. The combination of free protocols and open-source software ensures acceptance of the protocols in the Internet mainstream. There can be no stopping this.