Volantis releases Mobility Server to the Open Source Community [LWN.net]

From:		"Joe Palladino" <JPalladino-AT-schwartz-pr.com>
To:		lwn-AT-lwn.net
Subject:		Open Source and Mobility
Date:		Mon, 31 Mar 2008 17:22:42 -0400
Message-ID:		<47F11DE2.1057.00C6.0@schwartz-pr.com>

VOLANTIS RELEASES MOBILITY SERVER TO THE OPEN SOURCE COMMUNITY

Launches Mobility Server Open Source Project to Help Guide Developers

Guildford, U.K.?March 19, 2008?Volantis Systems, which provides the Intelligent Content Delivery
software delivering mobile content to more than 350 million mobile phone users worldwide, today
released its Mobility Server to the open source community under the GNU General Public License
(GPL), version three. In all the company opened 1.2 million lines of code, the result of seven
years?of development, to the community. The company also launched the Mobility Server Project to
help developers build out the mobile platform.

Volantis is the first mobile content delivery solutions vendor to open source its code and the
effort is part of the company? move to the enterprise market. In offering its Mobility Server to
the community, Volantis hopes to drive adoption and encourage more companies to bring usable and
compelling content to the mobile Web.

?Open source software and independent developers are quickly becoming the most important movement
in telecommunications industry,? said Luis Almansa of Telefonica. ?Telefonica has a strong desire
to work with open source projects which is why we created the OpenMovilForum project. It? also why
we fully support the idea that Volantis develops its own open source initiative.?

The mobile Web is the next major growth point for online communications, but the ever-growing
variety of mobile devices on the market makes it difficult to develop powerful Web applications.
Volantis Mobility Sever makes it cheap and easy for companies to create this content and distribute
it to the more than 5,000 mobile devices currently on the market.

?The mobile web is rapidly becoming the platform upon which mobile data revenues will be generated.
Open source overcomes the limitations imposed on content creation by license-fees,? said Nick Lane,
director, Direct2 Mobile research. ?Open source will redefine the extent to which content
publishers will be able to utilize and capitalize on the mobile web? opportunity and enable the
emergence of the long tail of content. Everyone? a winner.?

?The Internet grew, in large part, because it was easy to develop for the Web. Not only were
browsers relatively standardized, but the tools to create databases and complex systems are open
and available,? said Volantis CEO Mark Watson. ?Our goal is to bring that same openness to the
mobile Web. Developing for this market is difficult thanks to the splintered phone market, which
will only continue to diversify. Developers need an easy-to-use tool with a proven device library
in order to help their creativity come alive.?

Volantis made its Mobility Server available as a free download in November 2007. By open sourcing
the product, it hopes to tap into the broader development community to enhance and build upon its
work. The company has long contributed to a community standards process, driven by the World Wide
Web Consortium (W3C), to create the Device Independent Authoring Language (DIAL) specification. Web
development markup languages that comply with the DIAL specification, such as Volantis-created
XDIME, can be used interchangeably to create content viewable on any mobile device. Given the
maturity of the Volantis platform, the company felt the timing was right to offer its product to
the community.

Pricing and Availability

To support the Volantis Mobility Server, Volantis has launched a new portion of its website to
provide information on the new product version, to allow contributor input and to get started using
the product. The new website is located at http://opensource.volantis.com.

About Volantis

Volantis (www.volantis.com) is the world? leading supplier of Intelligent Content Adaptation
solutions for the Mobile Internet, providing applications, tools and platforms that solve the
complexity of delivering optimized services to any mobile device.

Volantis software is protected by the following granted and pending patent applications: United
Kingdom: 2371896, European Patent EP 1320972 (Ireland, France, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Spain,
Switzerland), pending European Patent Application EP 1641211 (designating Austria, Belgium, Cyprus,
Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Monaco, Netherlands,
Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom), Hong Kong: HK1049046, Japan:
2002-531257, Singapore: 95431, 200301776-9, India: 325/DEL/03, South Korea: 7004318/03, People?
Republic of China: ZL01819526, US: 10/381802.

Joe Palladino

JPalladino@schwartz-pr.com

(781) 684-0770

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(Log in to post comments)

Volantis releases Mobility Server to the Open Source Community

Posted Apr 1, 2008 23:42 UTC (Tue) by koiler (guest, #51375) [Link]

Volantis Mobility Server is a framework for delivering content to mobile devices.  It allows
content developers the ability to create their content once and deliver it to thousand of
devices (and actually have it look good).

This is the same software used to render content for major carrier portals throughout the
world, including the US.

Here's a more descriptive excerpt from
http://www.volantis.com/docs/Volantis-Mobility-Server-1.0...

"At run-time, the Mobility Server detects the device, then automatically
renders the final page replacing abstract design policies with devicespecific
output for the device, and adapting content and digital assets
to be specific for each specific device."

Volantis releases Mobility Server to the Open Source Community

Posted Apr 2, 2008 8:28 UTC (Wed) by miannac (guest, #11411) [Link]

In other worlds the product offer some features similar to Apache Cocoon.
It might be interesting to see if it is worthwhile to merge some features between the two
products (now that also Volantis is opensource)

Volantis releases Mobility Server to the Open Source Community

Posted Apr 2, 2008 14:01 UTC (Wed) by shady (guest, #51387) [Link]

"In other worlds the product offer some features similar to Apache Cocoon."

Kind of. It's not a general purpose markup to markup transcoder, though it does include one - see the pipeline component below. It may be worth thinking about how to bring together the best elements of the two. Anyhow, some detail ...

Web authors use an extended form of XHTML (which uses the XForms form model), all of which it processes into device specific markup (device specific in the sense both that it could be a different markup and that the layout, images etc are optimised for the device characteristics, with reference to an included database of characteristics for around 5000 devices) at the server side.*
The markup can be embedded into dynamic pages (JSP, PHP and Ruby are supported out of the box) in the same way that normal browser markup is embedded for PC type sites.
Device variations for CSS properties (if the device doesn't support CSS, the server converts appropriately), image/digital asset variation and page layout can be controlled through a set of Eclipse plugins.
Content can also be controlled through direct reference to the device database, using a set of XHTML extensions called DISelect - docs here - http://opensource.volantis.com/docs/wag/sel_er.html
There is also a Cocoon-like pipeline component which can be used to call back end transformations and plugins in XSLT and Java. The docs for this are here: http://opensource.volantis.co m/docs/dci/dci_about.html ... this component also includes support for template elements, inclusion and fetches/transformation of content from local/remote web services, databases and URLs.

* At the client side, there is however a Javascript/AJAX widget toolkit included which can do stuff like validation, transitions, etc. Docs here - http://opensource.volanti s.com/docs/client/client_about.html - and working examples here - http://opensource.volantis.co m/article/framework_demo

Disclaimer - I'm a Volantis employee.

Volantis releases Mobility Server to the Open Source Community

Posted Apr 2, 2008 13:37 UTC (Wed) by shady (guest, #51387) [Link]

"You cannot download the software from their site without "logging in". 

You can also get it from http://sourceforge.net/projects/volmobserverce/