 |
|
   |
|
|
 |
Meet Andrea Trasatti- a Developers' Developer March Issue Roxanne "The Expert" Singleton This month I had the opportunity to sit down with one of the champions of WURFL: Andrea Trasatti. He found (and verified) the great majority of the devices accounted for in the WURFL. In addition to device spotting, Andrea also developed PHP support for WURFL and deployed those applications in commercial environments (which goes a long way in demonstrating how good the concept is). As a self-employed entrepreneur, he's been involved in the development and growth of both mark-up languages and his perspective is both delightful and informative. How did you get involved in WURFL? Back in 2002 I was working for Bware Technologies in Milan, contracting for a large Italian operator (TIM with 24 million subscribers). One popular application we were building for them was the Photo Album, which allowed people to share pictures on their mobile devices before MMS was introduced, thanks to a technology called Download Fun. At that time we were struggling with small differences in Download Fun support in different devices. When I heard people discussing WURFL on the WML Programming Mailing List, I instinctively recognized that WURFL could be the solution to our problems. The next step was to join the project. Little did I know that I would have one of the two top roles in the project within a few months. What's your role in the WURFL project today? I have several roles; the main one is the WURFL maintainer. Not only do I transfer all of my knowledge about devices into the WURFL repository every day, but I also collect and organize information I receive from other developers. This has meant a lot of work at times, but it was fun to figure out things about those devices that not many others have understood, not even the device manufacturer themselves. In addition to maintaining the repository, I also develop (and maintain) the PHP middleware that allows developers to deploy a WURFL-based solution very simply. What are some of the main benefits of WURFL? WURFL gives you a fully-fledged framework to discover device capabilities. Some companies offer the similar services, but their products are out of developer reach. UAProf is not good enough by itself for a few reasons: UAProf info is not always reliable and there is no ready-made middleware. WURFL sort of works around the first problem and, at the same time, give an excellent solution to the second. What are some of the new things you want to do (or add to) WURFL? Luca Passani [co-developer and Openwave employee] and I have discussed this extensively over the past few weeks and we agreed on the road ahead for the project in the middle term. We need three things for the project: consolidation, consolidation and consolidation! So far the project has been driven by developer needs (sometimes whims). Some decisions were rational, some were irrational. This process has served us reasonably well, particularly if you consider the scarce resources we had. Now things are changing: more and more people are adopting WURFL and we have higher confidence in the project. We would like to see new categories of users to adopt WURFL, particularly carriers. We know that WURFL is good enough for carriers or, at least, very close to their needs. The hard part is to convince them about this. We are not in a hurry, but we know that the only way to get there is to be able to "measure" the quality of the WURFL data and, eventually, provide guarantees about them. This is what we call consolidation and this is where we are aimed. What's the benefit of having WURFL as an open source project? Open source is everything. No open source, no WURFL. It's that simple. WURFL is about the community of people who provide device information and contributes to improve the middleware. There is no way this could have worked if the initiative had been less than 100% open. Let me borrow one of Luca's famous analogies here: open source is about telling one million people that they can get away with one million euros if they contribute one euro each. If you are honest, good at your work and you get people to trust you, then you are done: the magic happens! This edition of our newsletter features introductory articles authored by Luca Passani to both WALL and WURFL. If you are working with WURFL or WALL, let us know. We are always looking for success stories to promote on our web site. Roxanne has been working as an application developer for over 10 years. Her goal is to successfully write this column without having to join the marketing team or sit on the top floor with the execs. Roxy recently sold her vintage Motorola brick phone on eBay for $15. If you have a general question you'd like answered or just want us to know what's on your mind, let her know. Or, for more detailed or specific technical support questions, please visit ODN Developer Support. |