This chapter examines the enabling technologies of mobile commerce. The emphasis is on providing a coherent overview of the mobile commerce technology landscape and on suggesting where the service developer can best exercise choice.

The dominance of Internet technologies in software development has restricted developers' choices in such matters as presentation layer styles and system modalities. In other words, developers have become habituated to developing user applications that use HTML for the user interface–perhaps with some Flash animations for extra interest–and that take the user through single-routed, step-by-step procedures. The result has been a massive increase in developer productivity and an accompanying reduction in development risk. The Web has brought computing to the mainstream masses, but it has also narrowed our sense of what computing can be. Although plug-in technologies such as Flash and Java applets allow Web pages to become interactive, most Web experiences (and certainly the majority of e-commerce experiences) remain exercises in form filling.

The mobile commerce technology landscape is a good deal less stable, uniform, and predictable than Web development territory. Though WAP was hailed as an Internet-equivalent development and delivery environment, doubts persist as to whether WAP (in its present form) will survive as mainstream technology on the phone platform or acquire a significant role on the nonphone platform. The client devices engaged in the growth of mobile commerce show little of the conformity evident in the PC-dominated deskbound world.