Volantis releases open source mobile Internet toolkit

Mobile Web developers can make use of a new open source toolkit, released this week by Volantis Systems.

The Volantis Mobility Server (formerly called Framework) can now be downloaded under the GNU General Public License version 3. The Java-based software is a framework for building Web applications for mobile devices. The applications automatically is recast on the fly to adapt specifically to whatever device is accessing the Web content.

That means developers, in theory at least, can create a kind of master definition for an application, which is then served up for optimal viewing by different browsers on any of nearly 5,000 current handhelds, according to the vendor.

“Our software takes the master definition in our markup language, and compares it with a database of details about the target device, its layout, and its display,” says Mark Watson, CEO for Volantis, based on Guildford, England. Mobility Server adapts the markup language in response, affecting how the Web pages appear and behave on the target device’s display. “It exploits the features it knows exist on advanced smartphones, but uses something simpler [and more generic] if those [advanced] features are not available,” Watson says.

Volantis is releasing the software to spur for, and of, the mobile Internet. The idea, says Watson, is that developers can use Mobility Server to make their Web applications easily available to a much larger audiences of devices. The company will continue to offer its own applications, built on Mobility Server, and develop new ones. Current applications include: Broker, an online feed manager, and StoreFront, an e-commerce application for selling online content.

In response to a Web request from a mobile browser, the Volantis server software queries the device for information, and then combs through, in milliseconds, a database of device details. The database has up to 600 attributes per device, for nearly 5,000 devices. Once it identifies the device, the software can scale images, for example, to best suit the available pixels, or make use of Ajax libraries to validate fields of text or numeric data entered by a user in a form, without having to do so by submitting the form back to the Web server.