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Issue 34
This Month at a Glance
Developer MMSC Has Been Upgraded Please note that the developer MMSC running at skara.openwave.com has recently been upgraded to the latest version (3.0.0.2). The existing MMS SDK will still work, but there is now a newer version of the library available. This version of the library (3.0) now contains the source code for the com.openwave.mms.content and com.openwave.mms.mm7 packages allowing developers to better understand (or port) both the content composition and content delivery parts of the library. Please visit http://developer.openwave.com/dvl/tools_and_sdk/openwave_mobile_sdk/mms_sdk/index.htm to download the latest version of the MMS SDK and find out more about how to connect to the Openwave Developer MMSC. Jack's Hack: Delivering WAP2 Content with Multipart Servlets This month in Jack's Hack, we're going to revisit the topic of optimizing content delivery to WAP2 Devices. Back in April of 2003, we presented a Perl library that assists in the assembly and delivery of mime/multipart content, which can dramatically improve performance when delivering pages that rely on CSS and several images. This month, we present a Java utility to deliver mime/multipart solutions using Java Servlets. Read more... WAP2 App Takes Off (and Lands!) The WxServer is a successful WAP2/XHMTL application that provides pilots with up-to-the minute preflight weather information. RamPage.Net, a small application development and consulting group based in Silicon Valley and specializing in applied wireless technologies created this vital application. We had an opportunity to interview Richard Milewski, Owner, about the development process.Read more. Five Tips for Submitting J2ME Apps to the Directory When you submit your applications to the Openwave Mobile Applications Directory, keep the following five tips in mind to help ensure that your application receives a respectable rating:
Mobile Application Directory: Featured Applications Each month Openwave publishes the most innovative new applications submitted to our Mobile Applications Directory in the Mobile Applications Showcase so that network operators around the world can see what we believe is the cream of the crop. To have your application considered for the Showcase, you must be a register as an Openwave developer and complete the application submission form (here). Submissions are judged and will receive a ranking. Those that receive five stars (based on novelty, usability and technical excellence) are featured in the Showcase. During the evaluation process, a representative from the Openwave Developer Network will contact you and provide feedback on your application. Should your application not qualify the first time, you may resubmit a new version. And we encourage you to use the developer support services to help improve your application. These applications were featured in this month's showcase:
Fast Facts: Java Enabled Phones in Use 
March ODN Apple iPod™ Winner! "This is unbelievable, I had to read the email ten times to make sure I wasn't dreaming," said Ebbe Bruun, this month's Apple iPod™ digital music player winner. "How could I be that lucky?" Ebbe lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark where he's been working as a programmer since 1985. Register and Win Extended!  If you haven't already completed registration as an Openwave Developer Network member, now's your chance to do it and win an Apple iPod. Register before April 23rd, 2004! The next winner will be chosen on April 28, 2004. See the Register to Win official rules for full details restrictions. Must be 18 years or older to enter. Promotion ends April 24, 2004.
Ask An Expert  So you've built a great application, now what? How do you get someone to buy it? This month, Roxy suggests some useful ways to help you get your application sold. Read more...
We Want to Hear From You  Tell us which markup language you use to build your wireless sites in our current survey. In our last survey asked about your thoughts on the proposed mobile-specific Top Level Domain (TLD). As we go to print, the consensus is that this is not the right solution:
CTIA Wrap-Up We had a lot of fun with many of you participating in the Openwave Great Race! One of our own ODN developers, Joel Goldsmith of MAD Waves, won a DVD recorder. Overall, most developers were interested in the new V7 client and the new capabilities it is providing for application development. Openwave representatives talked many service provider customers who were quite interested in the Openwave Application Directory (see more about that in this newsletter). We also had outstanding partner participation in our booth including InfoSpace, Cellmania, PocketThis, Musiwave, Mforma, Funmail, Digital Bridges and Tira Wireless. Our next event is JavaOne at the end of July. If you are at the show, make sure you come by the booth and see us. Upcoming Events ODN will be front and center at the industry events and conferences listed below. If you're planning on attending, stop by the Openwave booth and visit with the ODN team! JavaOne June 28-July 1, 2004 Moscone Center San Francisco, California Press Releases Openwave And SurfControl Co-Operate To Provide Mobile Content Management And Monitoring Solution Nextel Introduces Mobile Locator Service Using Openwave's Software And Services Openwave And Montavista Partner To Offer Complete Solution For Advanced Mobile Phones With Linux Consumer Adoption Of Wireless Data Services Grows In Americas WAP2 App Takes Off (and Lands!) The WxServer is a successful WAP2/XHMTL application that provides pilots with up-to-the minute preflight weather information. RamPage.Net, a small application development and consulting group based in Silicon Valley and specializing in applied wireless technologies created this vital application. We had an opportunity to interview Richard Milewski, Owner, about the development process using WAP2/XHTML and Openwave tools. What was it like creating a WAP2 site? It was an adventure. I came to the project with lots of experience on the web and almost none in mobile devices. I am different from most WAP2 developers who come from the WML world, which proved to be both good and bad. I had unreasonable expectations about operational consistency across the different mobile device browsers. Programming for WAP2 devices today feels a lot like programming for the World Wide Web ten years ago. Browsers and the underlying hardware are changing rapidly, and new devices are announced at the rate of a couple a week. The advantage was that WAP2 lets us treat a mobile device much as one would a computer. Having Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) available meant that I could do the architectural design and the user interface design in separate steps. That's much harder to do in a WML environment. How did Openwave help you accomplish your goal? I don't think I could have done it at all without the device simulators in the Openwave SDKs. Every other device emulator I've been able to find is running code designed to look like the device. The Openwave Simulator runs the same code that's running in phones that use Openwave browsers. I spent a lot of time chasing phantom problems in one of the other phone emulators that didn't parse the XHTML the same way that the phone does. Finally I gave up and completed the site testing almost exclusively on the Openwave SDK and validating the XHTML with the W3C mark-up validator. That combination proved the most productive. The Openwave simulator isn't just a development tool; it can be a marketing tool as well. We used screen shots from the Openwave simulator to build a tour of WxServer for our marketing web site. Some very knowledgeable Openwave experts hang out on the WMLProgramming forum on Yahoo! Ron Mandel and Luca Passani helped me find my way out of more than a few of the blind alleys I wandered down during the implementation of WxServer. They willingly volunteered assistance at a time when direct queries sent to other browser vendors and phone manufacturers were simply ignored. Openwave showed me they care about developers. Specifically, what features of WAP2 / XHTML did you use? CSS was a big plus. The color graphic format support in the WAP2 phones is essential to the WxServer application. The most used feature is probably the NEXRAD radar maps. Our users are pilots, mostly small plane pilots flying out of literally thousands of small airports around the US. WxServer can deliver a radar map of the area that's less than ten minutes old around any airport in the lower 48 states and some areas of Southern Canada. A radar map in black and white can tell you it's raining. The same map in color can tell you how hard it's raining. If you're trying to decide whether to fly into approaching weather or sit on the ground and wait it out, that difference can be crucial. In addition, the ACCESSKEY attribute that's in the Openwave extensions to WML is part of the WAP2 standard. That makes a huge difference in the usability of a complex application like WxServer. What are you doing with WURFL? WURFL is far and away the best tool I've found to attack the problem of discovering the capabilities of a given phone. Currently more than 80 different mobile devices are used to access WxServer every day?and we get two or three new ones every week. Since maps are an important feature of WxServer, it's really important that we know the screen size of each device that visits the site. We don't want to deliver a 100 by 100 pixel map to a device that has a 170 by 220 pixel screen. The additional detail we can include in a larger map will give the pilot a better picture of what's happening. And WURFL provides more than just screen size. It's evolving rapidly right now. We're working with the WURFL team to include information that will help programmers deal with subtle differences in the way different devices behave. Some devices scale images too large to fit on a screen, some crop the image, and some put up scroll bars. That's an important difference that doesn't appear in phone spec sheets or in the headers that the phones send to the servers. I think WURFL will become an indispensable tool for mobile device programmers over the next few months. It's especially important if you don't have access to the UAProf information, which is often inaccessible to independent developers. What are you doing to market your application? WxServer is among the narrowest of vertical applications. It's used by pilots who are computer savvy and have discovered mobile browsers. Reaching that group is a daunting marketing problem. The wireless carriers are interested in promoting horizontal applications that appeal to tens of millions of subscribers. There aren't ten million pilots on the whole planet, so we can't count on the carriers to help us market. We're advertising in AvWeb, an e-mail newsletter and web site that reaches about 130,000 pilots every week. Because it's electronically delivered, we know we're hitting pilots with a predisposition to use technology. We're also offering free subscriptions to flight instructors. They get the first year free, and if five or more of their students sign up for paid subscriptions, the instructor gets a free renewal. The jury is still out on whether or not the flight instructor program is a good idea or not. Do you have any advice for anyone developing WAP2 applications? I think it's important to separate the functional design from the user interface design. That will probably be the hardest thing for a WML programmer to get used to, but it will become increasingly important as the capabilities of mobile devices expand over the next couple of years. Right now the rate of that expansion is still accelerating, so it's going to be an interesting time for mobile device developers. I think it's also important for anyone implementing a corporate web application to make sure that they consider incorporating support for mobile devices into the design. What else did you learn from this process? Because Verizon is the largest wireless carrier in the US and they don't yet support XHTML, we had to go back and implement a WML version of the site that runs in parallel to service the legacy phones like those on the Verizon network. It was surprisingly easy to port the XHTML to WML and produce a solidly running site. It doesn't provide nearly as rich a user experience as the XHTML site, but it supplies the essential utility. In thinking about it, I'm sure that going the other direction, from WML to XHTML would be a more difficult process. It would be easy to wind up with a site that had the look and feel of a WML site and lacked the richer user experience that's easy to implement in WAP2. Click here if you would like to learn more about the WxServer or you can talk directly with Richard A. Milewski by email.
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