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  Sunday, October 05, 2003


On the way back from the west coast, I had time (6 hours) to catch up on some magazine reading.  Having not checked it out before, I wanted to read my first issue of Wireless Business & Technology, a sister SYS-CON magazine to .NET Developers Journal which I write for.

I found several articles of interest to developers in the Microsoft mobility space.  Since I was just speaking on ASP.NET Mobile Controls and I'm doing some work with this technology, I had particular interest in an article titled Welcome to the WURFL by Luca Passani of OpenWave.  This article is about WURFL, the Wireless Universal Resource File, which "is a configuration file that contains info about he capabilities and the feauers of devices available on market".

While the WURFL file itself is intelligible to a human (or at least a programmer), this is hardly its main use. Developers use the WURFL to figure out device capabilities programmatically and to serve different content to different devices dynamically, depending on the capabilities of the device accessing the content. This is commonly referred to as multiserving a wireless application.

It is accurate to regard the WURFL as some kind of universal database containing info about all known wireless terminals. One requirement is that such a database must be accessible on all platforms. This is why we chose XML for the WURFL.

The WURFL contains a list of <device> elements, each one representing a family of devices (and not necessarily a unique device). At the time of this writing, the WURFL contains over 1,500 devices and over 300 modeled properties (capabilities). It should be noted that WURFL also catches software subversions, which explains why there are so many devices.

Does this sound familiar?  It sounds like the way ASP.NET reads the capabilities from the Machine.Config file to get the capabilities of a device.  But the article doesn't mention anything about ASP.NET Mobile Controls.

So WURFL benefits from the open source developers who submit device updates back to the WURFL site.  While the Microsoft solution is extensible (b/c I can edit the xml-based Machine.Config file), how does ASP.NET get a similar help?  What do you call DU3?

I'm working on a future .NETDJ article about these issues.  However, instead of waiting for the DEC issue, you need to check out the Device Profile Service which allows a developer to build an entry for a new mobile device so that you could update your Machine.Config file.

More information about WURFL can be found at http://wurfl.sourceforge.net/backgroundinfo.php

 


2:52:56 PM    comment []

Here is an interesting resource on mobile web technologies.

http://thewirelessfaq.com

Although slanted towards Java and open source camps, they do have good background info.


2:03:00 PM    comment []


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