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

Volantis releases Mobility Server to the Open Source Community

Posted Apr 1, 2008 21:50 UTC (Tue) by Wummel (guest, #7591)
Parent article: Volantis releases Mobility Server to the Open Source Community

You cannot download the software from their site without "logging in". And I still have no
idea after reading the announcement what the software does exactly.

This is not very friendly to open source users. Instead of counting code lines, or giving an
interpretation of the mobile market situation, Volantis should provide a simple program
description together with some download links.

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] (2 responses)

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] (1 responses)

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/