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Date: Wed, 8 Jul 2015 10:50:10 +0200
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 <CAAGawe0+1tdNO1XC92OM84Z73H_665XfY0U9RcrpFmeCnmAtwA@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Browser detection / status of version 2
From: Werner Keil <werner.keil@gmail.com>
To: dev@devicemap.apache.org
Cc: Stefan Seelmann <mail@stefan-seelmann.de>
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Hello Stefan,

Thanks a lot for your input. You're asking some good and constructive
questions.

With regards to what devices have a browser, this recent post on the
DeviceAtlas (clearly the most visible and likely notable commercial vendor
in this field) page
https://deviceatlas.com/blog/which-devices-have-browsers
It contains devices like XBox or even Samsung Gear, etc.

With regards to dealing with devices and browsers separately, the DDR
standard and formats has always intended to do so, just look at
https://svn.apache.org/viewvc/devicemap/trunk/data/1.0/device-data/src/main/resources/devicedata/BrowserDataSource.xml?view=co&revision=1686469&content-type=text%2Fplain
but this and other XML files are clearly undervalued and barely used
especially by the "Classifier" family of clients.

Other clients due to their W3C DDR compliant heritage do, but if the data
is not maintained there, neither will get you proper results;-|

You're right, that some of the visions around 2.0 can be promising if
there's enough support by the community. Neither of us can do this alone,
and while some projects like this may be smaller than others, a key reason
to donate the codebase of OpenDDR here was to increase the community where
possible.

Aside from a service-based approach
https://deviceatlas.com/resources/dynamic-data
DeviceAtlas also makes it pretty clear, their primary format is JSON now:
https://deviceatlas.com/resources/getting-the-data
while it is safe to assume, other commercial closed-source alternatives
like WURFL still dance around the WURFL.xml even if they may have stored it
into some XML DB now, too;-)

An important effort is, to transform existing device information (our crown
jewel after all;-) from XML to JSON once the new format or formats are
defined and agreed on. Whether or not there's also a 2-way conversion, we
shall see.
You can be sure, commercial closed-source vendors like DeviceAtlas offer
this but it's up to the community if we can and want to offer that as well.

Contributing e.g. via JIRA or (I think you may also self-register for that)
the Wiki would be a good start. If you have concrete patches or code
contributions, attaching them (as patch, diff or "snippet") to a JIRA
ticket is a good practice to start helping. For some this lead to becoming
a full committer, so we'd welcome others to do so if they help on a regular
basis.

Thanks and Regards,

Werner

On Wed, Jul 8, 2015 at 12:24 AM, Stefan Seelmann <mail@stefan-seelmann.de>
wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I have the need to classify not only mobile devices, but also desktop
> browsers and other clients (e.g. email clients) including operating
> system and versions. The current state of DeviceMap seems not suitable
> for this, for example Firefox and Chrome are just classifed as
> "desktopDevice".
>
> I already tried to add patterns to BuilderDataSourcePatch.xml and
> DeviceDataSourcePatch.xml. That somehow worked, but if I understand the
> data format correctlry I'd have to create one "device" per
> OS+version/browser+version, which would result in an insane number of
> combinations.
>
> Is there a better way to define data using the version 1 device data
> format to achive my needs?
>
>
> I also browsed the wiki and mailing list archive. The "Device Data 2.0"
> specification looks very promising to me. There seem to be neither code
> nor data (not even prototypes) available. Based on mailing list archive
> I'm even not sure if there is consensus among the developers go for this
> new data format.
>
> Are there plans within the community to develop the version 2?
>
> How can I help (with limited resources...)?
>
>
> Kind Regards,
> Stefan
>

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