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

Volantis releases Mobility Server to the Open Source Community

Posted Apr 2, 2008 8:28 UTC (Wed) by miannac (guest, #11411)
In reply to: Volantis releases Mobility Server to the Open Source Community by koiler
Parent article: Volantis releases Mobility Server to the Open Source Community

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)

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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.