My first 30 days at the new job were over Sunday and man it's been a blur.
For last couple months I've been working on a mobile web site, something I haven't done much of in years. And when I last looked at mobile web dev, it was in the sad WAP days of 2000. Things sure have changed since then.
Although we aren't as hampered as we used to be (meaning the mobile browser is no longer confined to a 5-line text-only display), but in ways the progress has made mobile web dev even harder because there are so many browsers on so many devices. You ASP.NET developers know how you have to update the browser capabilities yourself because Microsoft pawned those duties off to a company that apparently has no intentions of keeping up their end of the deal? Well, imagine having to deal with every mobile phone that comes out. Yes, it really is that bad.
Luckily, with progress comes success and now the device makers are starting to migrate toward the better browsers, but there are still new phones being released that can't deal with xhtml (as seen in this post regarding the shortcomings of the Sanyo MM-5600). So, until the day when every mobile device comes with a great browser, we either have to refuse to service some users or we have to do some adaptive rendering. As a .NET developer, I shudder when I hear those words, but there is a great open source project that helps tremendously in this area: WURFL (and the related WALL tag library).
WURFL is somewhat similar to Microsoft's xml-based browser capabilities area of the web.config/machine.config, except orders of magnitude more powerful, not only in the capabilities it lists, but more importantly due to the 6000 devices currently included in it, the number of people helping to keep it updated, and the ease of keeping it updated, patched, and customized as needed.
WURFL's WALL tag library is a set of JSP tags that handles the adaptive rendering so that you can serve your page as WML, XHTML, or CHTML as needed. You can also check various capabilites on the fly as needed in order to know the best version of the page (or control) to serve the device. There is a WALL tutorial here that will explain this a little further, but if you have done any work with adaptive rendering, you know the general idea.
If you've worked with ASP.NET very seriously (or very well), you've made changes to the .NET browser caps section. Imagine how great it would be if that were maintained by the community of .NET developers instead of by those slack [CENSORED] at cyscape. WURFL can't be hijacked by a company that will do nothing with it, it is a community project and has a great little community working with it. There are also ports to php (with MySQL instead of the xml data repository), and to .NET. I plan on looking into the later more when (if?) I get some free time.
And a Scoblephone.
Hint: it would be a Good Thing for you to send me one, Audiovox.