Monthly Archives: April 2007

Bathurst, NSW, AU Update

I am at Charles Sturt University these past few days and having a cool new experience – for the first time I am facing all of the “local customization” issues that they have and trying to find clever solutions that meet their needs. It is great fun and we are coming up with clever ways to make subtle local changes to do some pretty cool stuff.
For me this is a neat learning experience. Next week is Educause in Melbourne where I give an invited talk on Pushing the boundaries of Innovation using Community Source and a Teaching with Sakai Workshop and a Programming in Sakai Workshop.
Busy days.

Sent to the WURFL List

Hello all, I am using WURFL in the Sakai collaboration system (www.sakaiproject.org).
Like several others – I found the need to “touch up” the Java APIs so I grabbed a copy of the code, put it in our SVN.
https://source.sakaiproject.org/svn//portal/trunk/portal-impl/impl/src/java/net/
I added an acknowledgement to Sakai’s acknowledgements:
https://source.sakaiproject.org/svn//reference/trunk/library/src/webapp/content/gateway/acknowledgments.html
The main thing I needed to fix was that the Loos match was too loose :) I ultimately needed to decide whether or not I *had* a mobile device from the user agent. So I made some new code that effectively takes the UA sets it to lower case, removes spaces and numbers and then demands an exact match to the UA in WURFL (with the text reduction aplied to the UA)
This handles a lot of situations where the version numbers increment but nothing else changes in a UA.
I also was bummed that I could not get the actual UA form a device id that I got from a Loose lookup.
I also did what others did and got rid of the System.out.printlns.
I am happy for others to use these mods or contribute them.
Again – thanks for the work on WURFL.
Charles Severance
www.dr-chuck.com

WURFL (Wireless Universal Resource File) added to PDA support in Sakai

Coming back form the airport – I was playing with my Treo and realized that if I *knew* I was talking to a narrow device, I could do things like place the “Log In” text more nicely.
There was a discussion on the dev list a whle back about a thing called WURFL(Wireless Universal Resource File) that gave yo all kinds of properties about mobile phones. So at 6AM on a bus, I decided to “look into” what it would take. Now about 20 hours later I have it ready to go :) It was trickier than I thought.
The biggest issue was the existing Java APIs around WURFL did a really bad job of matching user agents – particularly when a Treo 600 user agent changes on upgrades with minor versions change on the browser compatibility.
So, I pulled the source into Sakai, fixed it, added an acknowledgement, and made it work for the PDA portal. All to save a line on my Treo 600 display :)
I put in my stock dev notes that have little or no meaning.

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The Sakai Frameless Portal is *Alive*

For me, one of my personal holy grails has been the elimination of all frames – another step has been taken in that direction and is now in the trunk of Sakai for you to use and play with. Over the past few weeks I have been working on changing the Sakai PDA portal to eliminate the *last* frame and blend the navigation of Sakai with the tool.
Here is a picture of frameless Sakai running on the PSP and some pictures of the portal running on my Treo.
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~csev/images/2007/04/DSC01054.JPG
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~csev/images/2007/04/DSC00039.JPG
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~csev/images/2007/04/DSC00041.JPG
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~csev/images/2007/04/DSC00043.JPG
I got a PSP for my son Brent yesterday for his birthday and he was quite unhappy as I immediately took it from him for several hours as I tested it out on the new Sakai frameless PDA portal. He will be even less happy if I tell him I need to take his brand-new PSP to the IMS Learning Impact meeting all next week so I can do demos. :)

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