An Introduction to Fire Eagle

A definite highlight of Over the Air 2008 was London-based Yahoo Steve Marshall's introduction to Fire Eagle. For those not in the loop (which, to be fair, is most people: Fire Eagle is currently only open to a limited number of invited developers) Fire Eagle is Yahoo!'s brand new API for location-based services.

An Introduction to Tera-WURFL

I recently added a post about Wurfl, a comprehensive open-source XML database of mobile device capabilities. I noted that actually querying Wurfl in a performant manner:

is going to be a non-trivial task, and is perhaps a topic for a further article.

Well, I guess this is that article. It's time to have a look at Tera-WURFL, which is perhaps the most popular tool for querying Wurfl programmatically - from PHP, at least.

A Brief Glossary of Mobile Jargon

A few terms that seem to get bandied about in the industry. I'll probably add to this over time.

Managing Mobile and Non-mobile Versions of a Site Using Tera-WURFL and Zend Framework

This is a quick proof-of-concept I put together after a discussion on how to deal with running a mobile site and a 'full' web site on the same hostname in a sane way, and to transparently route user agents to the appropriate site.

Mobile Device Detection: WURFL and UAProf

If you do any kind of development for mobile devices, you'll soon stagger into the minefield of browser and device detection.

Now, this is quite a different sort of challenge to that faced on the desktop web. On the desktop we have maybe one browser worth using, plus a whole lot of people using Internet Explorer, along with a handful of computer programmers who, bewilderingly, persist in using Firefox.