A First Look at the New WURFL API for PHP

About a month ago, the New WURFL API for PHP was officially released. While the code had been available in one form or another for some time, the official release coincided nicely with the early stages of a new project at work, so it seemed like an appropriate time to have a look at the API and see if it was something we wanted to use.

By way of a refresher, WURFL is a "Device Description Repository" - a huge open-source XML-based database of information regarding mobile handsets and their capabilities. I've discussed WURFL in the past, for example here. Prior to this release, the only practical method of querying WURFL in real time from PHP was via a library named Tera-WURFL, which I blogged about here. In fact, both WURFL and Tera-WURFL were covered in an article I wrote for php|architect magazine last year.

We've generally been very happy with Tera-WURFL, but it's always worth considering one's options, so what follows is an overview of my experiences with, and first impressions of the New WURFL API.

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.

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.