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Jack's Hack for the month of January, 2005:
Welcome back to Jack's Hack, we trust that you had a happy holiday season and are enjoying the new year. As a belated holiday gift to you, we are very please to release the GA Version of the Openwave Phone Simulator V7. This month, we'll take a look at some of the changes and improvements that have been made since the preview release in October. Before we get started, if you've not had a chance to yet, please take a few moments to download this latest version of the simulator. Having it running resident on your system will hopefully help this article make much more sense. Which devices is the Phone Simulator V7 relevant to? You might want to check out the Phones List for an up to date list of devices with the relevant browser versions. What are the changes since
the "Preview" Release?
The biggest change you probably noticed is the way
the Phone Simulator starts up. Instead of beginning in an active
browser session, upon selecting the Simulator Preview from the Start Menu, you begin in
the "idle" state of the device. This change was made to accommodate the fact that there
are really several pieces to the Phone Simulator. This really isn't a change from the "preview" version,
but I thought it was worth reiterating for those folks who are coming to this release w/o
having first experience the preview version.
Now on to the improvements since the preview. The biggest, and possibly most important enhancement is support for a true "http-direct" connection. This means that you are no longer dependent on either connecting through the Openwave Developer MAG, or through a local proxy. The way that the direct connection is established is also slightly different than in previous incarnations of the Phone Simulator. Since this is truly a HTTP stack device, we're just using the HTTP stack and DNS lookup capabilities native to the browser (in older versions of the Phone Sim, we actually ported a little bit of Gateway code to accommodate http direct connections).
Another new feature you might notice in the screen shot above is the "Edit IP" button next to the Client ID Format dropdown. If you choose to use an IP address as a client ID, the Phone Simulator will automatically pick up your local IP address for use as the client ID. If you wish to override this selection, simply click the "Edit IP" button (which only becomes active upon selection of IP Addres as Client ID Format) and input the IP address you wish to use.
The "Network Information" Window from the 6.2.2 release is now back in full effect. This window will allow you to track the complete request and response traffic that is going back and forth from the phone simulator to the internet in all of its glory Also, new to this release are the check boxes on the bottom of the phone information window that allow you to throttle the amount of information that is displayed in the console. If you select http-raw you will see the complete transaction traffic generated by the browser. If you select headers you will only see the headers sent with each request. If you click on any of the urls displayed in the white font in the console, they will be fetched using your default web browser. Selecting or de-selecting the check boxes will impact only the display of the data (all of the data is available to you if you change your mind and decide to have it displayed later...)
Another "enhancement," or at least something that new and different, is the location of the commands to flush the cache, history, cookies, etc... These can now be accessed from the Debug menu on the console window (in addition to within the browser menu). The menu item to switch phone configurations (Load Device), is now also under the File menu on the console window Remember, if you wish to full exit and shut down the Phone Simulator, you must close the console window, in addition to closing the simulator window. What's still under development?
While the Network Information window is back, the
syntax highlighting in it has gone, and that's a personal pet peeve. We
should see this feature come back as in "improvement" in a future release.
One of the elements still under
development is the Language settings. The good news is that this can be
worked around by modifications in the Headers tab of the device settings. The other major "under-development" area still under development for the V7 Phone Simulator is the documentation and sample code. However, since the browser handles the same content types as 6.2.2, the information in XHTML-MP/CSS Reference Guide and the XHTML Style Guide still apply to this release. If there are specific features that you'd like to see added to the Phone Simulator or some favorites features that you can't seem to find or put your finger on in this release, please don't hesitate to drop us a line and let us know. What else do I need to know? In this release, configuration for end to end
MMS testing has been modified slightly, and you will need to provision
the Phone Simulator V7 as a new subscriber. The details for all of this
can be found in the
MMS Quick Start for V7. Also, the existing
instructions for integrating the Phone Simulator in to IDE's
have be validated. All you need to do is repeat the instructions
for 6.2.2 using the path information to the latest install. The other good
news is that Phone Simulator 6.2.2 and V7 will happily co-exist and
run simultaneously on your system. We have also set up a new
discussion forum dedicated to handling issues related to this V7 release. If
you run into issues or have questions specific to this release, please
post them in the discussion forum. As always, don't hesitate to drop the Openwave Developer Services team a line from our feedback form if you've got any other questions about this release of the Phone Simulator. |
