Rails site for mobile devices too

Rails
1

Guys,

Need help on how to serve pages for mobile devices. Can someone point
out a
couple of references to start? I’ve been reading some materials and
already
have a couple of questions:

  1. Is WAP (WML) still needed or can we go directly to XHTML-MP? I mean
    do
    the majority of mobile browsers already understand XHTML-MP? What is
    it’s
    acceptance and spread?

  2. Any generators for XHTML-MP views? Coding by hand is quite arduous…

  3. How to handle login and sessions? I mean, does the mobile device
    sends
    it’s telephone number? Or any other unique identifier? Is it capable of
    accepting & storing cookies?

Thanks in advance for the help!

Cheers, Sazima

2

On 11 Nov 2008, at 13:58, Ricardo Sazima wrote:

  1. Any generators for XHTML-MP views? Coding by hand is quite
    arduous…

The mobile stuff I’ve done has been plain old xhtml mobile profile
stuff. I’m sure there are old-skool wap phones still out there though.
To an extent it depends on your target market, eg if you’re primary
target is business people then making sure it works well on a
blackberry is probably more important than worrying about wap

  1. How to handle login and sessions? I mean, does the mobile device
    sends it’s telephone number? Or any other unique identifier? Is it
    capable of accepting & storing cookies?

Mobile devices tend to be a lot stricter as to how many cookies they
will store and things like that. Phones do not send a unique id or
their phone number, but companies like http://bango.com/ have deals
with the mobile network operators that allow them to identify people
(last time I looked it thought everyone using opera mini was in norway
(because opera mini proxies traffic through servers in norway) and had
trouble with iphones.

Fred

3

Hi Fred,

The audience is the average Internet user. Any idea on what mobile
browser capabilities to expect? Do you think WML is mandatory or can
we stick to xHTML?

How did you generate xHTML views? Did you use any specific editor /
IDE?

Finally, how do you differentiate between your users?

Cheers, Sazima

On Nov 11, 12:09 pm, Frederick C. [email protected]

4

On 11 Nov 2008, at 16:32, Sazima wrote:

Hi Fred,

The audience is the average Internet user. Any idea on what mobile
browser capabilities to expect? Do you think WML is mandatory or can
we stick to xHTML?
No idea, not really my area of expertise

How did you generate xHTML views? Did you use any specific editor /
IDE?
rails does xhtml anyway.

Finally, how do you differentiate between your users?

We have a slightly peculiar setup but at the end of the day we decided
cookies were enough.

5

So, cookies work after all? Any special way of setting it and/or
handling?

Cheers, Sazima

On Nov 11, 2:41 pm, Frederick C. [email protected]

6

On 11 Nov 2008, at 17:05, Sazima wrote:

So, cookies work after all? Any special way of setting it and/or
handling?

Same as normal, but like I said mobile browsers are likely to be more
stringent when it comes to stopping you going overboard (or just
deleting old cookies because they only allocate a small amount of
space to cookies).

Fred

7

Hi Fred,

Thanks for the help and patience! I’m almost getting what I need, but
2 things are still missing (XHTML views and cookies/sessions). Can you
provide a short example for them?

  1. rails does xhtml anyway

  2. Same as normal, but like I said mobile browsers are likely to be
    more
    stringent when it comes to stopping you going overboard => how do you
    set sessions and retrieve values? It’s really not working for me…

Cheers, Sazima

On Nov 11, 3:29 pm, Frederick C. [email protected]

8

On Nov 12, 2:59 am, Sazima [email protected] wrote:

Hi Fred,

Thanks for the help and patience! I’m almost getting what I need, but
2 things are still missing (XHTML views and cookies/sessions). Can you
provide a short example for them?

  1. rails does xhtml anyway

You don’t need to do anything(except I suppose putting the correct
doctype and so on in your layout), you’ll get xhtml anyway

  1. Same as normal, but like I said mobile browsers are likely to be
    more
    stringent when it comes to stopping you going overboard => how do you
    set sessions and retrieve values? It’s really not working for me…

I never had to do anything different than on the desktop.

Fred