The MyMobileWeb team is pleased to announce the availability of an early implementation of W3C’s DDR Simple API specification, which has been published yesterday as a Last Call Working Draft. This API is described as “Simple” in anticipation of a future more advanced API which will have a much wider scope.

http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-DDR-Simple-API-20080404/

From the Abstract:

“Web content delivered to mobile devices usually benefits from being tailored to take into account a range of factors such as screen size, markup language support and image format support. Such information is stored in “Device Description Repositories” (DDRs).This document describes a simple API for access to DDRs, in order to ease and promote the development of Web content that adapts to its Delivery Context.”

Our implementation is based on WURFL and UAProf data and supports the W3C’s Core Vocabulary and the MyMobileWeb’s vocabulary (the vocabulary used by MyMobileWeb to adapt content and applications). It is flexible enough to incorporate other data sources if available.

The implementation can be downloaded at

http://forge.morfeo-project.org/frs/download.php/314/DevInfo-Simple0.9.1.tar.gz

We are now working on integrating MyMobileWeb with the API implementation. We anticipate that our product will be one of the first open source adaptation tools that will use this new API.

Comments on the implementation are welcome. Please send comments to ddr-ri-develop@lists.morfeo-project.org

We have been evaluating Mobile JSF an open source product intended to the development of mobile web applications, which has been recently released by Ericsson. The main conclusion is that it is a couple of light years behind MyMobileWeb. The most important limitations of Mobile JSF with respect to MyMobileWeb are:

• Mobile JSF’s device database contains only a minimal set of devices with a minimal set of properties. This fact has led us to the conclusion that Mobile JSF is not doing any kind of advanced content adaptation. They only send the correct markup to each device, but as we know, that is not enough. Remember that MyMobileWeb uses a bunch of properties to adapt to devices, the majority of them coming from WURFL.
• CSS Media Queries selection mechanisms are not as flexible as the style overriding mechanisms provided by MyMobileWeb. For instance, in MyMobileWeb, using style overriding, one can, very easily, to set up different layouts for different devices.
• Content selection based on CSS Media Queries is not efficient nor feasible in terms of bandwidth consumption. MyMobileWeb selects content at the server side which is far more efficient
• Automatic Pagination functionalities are not present in Mobile JSF
• Automatic Validations based on script on the client side are not supported by Mobile JSF
• The set of user interface components is very poor compared to MyMobileWeb’s

Conclusion: Mobile JSF is not an alternative to MyMobileWeb.