I’m a subscriber to a PHP magazine php|architect. I still haven’t finished reading the july edition. In the past I didn’t have to do much with web applications and mobile phones. Recently though we had to make a certain part of a bigger application we made to be available on blackberry. The problem of course we faced is of course how to identify if the current agent is a mobile phone. And that’s how we found WURFL.WURFL aka Wireless Universal Resource File is a device description repository or to make it simple it’s a big library of various mobile phones abilities and attributes mapped to user agents.

What does this have to do with php|architect? Well in the 2008 july edition of php|architect there is a really lovely article about web application tools for mobile phones. I found there are two more PHP tools that a mobile web applications developer should know of. It’s Tera-WURFL and HAWHAW. And again to make it simple Tera-WURFL is a mysql database for WURFL to make WURFL super fast and HAWHAW is a object oriented toolkit to create mobile web applications. Basicly with HAWHAW you can construct pages using objects and then HAWHAW renders them to apropriate formats such as WML, XHTML MP, XHTML using the data it gets from Tera-WURFL. According to the php architect article Wikipedia is using HAWHAW.

I don’t have to do much with mobile web applications I think it’s great that these kind of tools are available because I know it is easy to develop these kinds of applications if I or others have to.

library, mobile, phone, PHP Hide