Short post this time inspired by a recent piece from Kristina O'Connell at Crescendo Networks titled 'Optimize Applications for Mobile Browsers'.
The piece highlights a Gartner report anticipating the growth in 2010 of handsets that will be capable of rich mobile commerce (Gartner's Top Ten Strategic Technologies for 2010). These handsets will look to access websites or other web applications and therefore as Kristina points out there will be a need to optimize your applications for this.
Kristina touches on the performance issues of applications being accessed by mobile handsets and offers good practical advice on how to achieve these optimizations citing data compression as one example, and how this can free up resources within your existing infrastructure.
However, at this stage it is important to add a further element to the discussion, but without delving too deep into the technical aspects: ) It is all very well and good optimizing your applications for access by mobile handsets/devices. But as we all know the number of handset/devices with different capabilities and frequency with which they come onto the market is quite amazing.
Therefore it is important that you optimize your applications accordingly for each different handset/device looking to access your website and web applications.
How can you do this?
Well, thanks to Luca Passani at WURFL (Wireless Universal Resource File) and his contributors, including individuals from a number of the carriers, there is a way! WURFL is basically a global database of all devices and their capabilities. As noted on the site, 'WURFL is an XML configuration file which contains information about capabilities and features of many mobile devices. The main scope of the file is to collect as much information as we can about all the existing mobile devices that access WAP pages so that developers will be able to build better applications and better services for the users.'
Luca and his many contributors also offer a Java API which is great news for those users of Zeus Traffic Manager who looking to undertake this type of application optimization on their application delivery controller.
Interested parties can find out more in an article by Zeus' Yvan Seth on our Zeus KnowledgeHub resource.
Mark Gyles
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