We are proud to announce that the Mobalean wiki has been merged with the Keitai-dev wiki. The Keitai-dev wiki was created in 2004 to serve as an English language resource for Japanese mobile development. At Mobalean, we created our own wiki with a similar purpose in mind, so this merge is natural. With this merge, the Keitai-dev wiki becomes the premier English language resource for Japanese mobile web development.

Mobalean will now handle the management of this wiki, and continue to expand it with content relevant to Japanese mobile development. Thanks to Starling Software, the previous host of the Keitai-dev wiki, for creating this resource and helping us merge these two resources.

In June of 2009, mobalean release a patch for the WURFL containing Japanese handsets. This patch ignored the existing data on Japanese handsets in the WURFL as it was sparse and mostly incorrect. However, this also made it incompatible with the core WURFL, and applying the patch either required using one of the more lenient libraries, or manually editing the core WURFL.

After half a year, thanks to the hard work of the WURFL maintainers, these incompatibilities have been reconciled, and the data merged into the core WURFL. Any developer using the WURFL can now use it to start building Japanese sites right away.

Because our patch has been included in the core WURFL, we will no longer maintain a separate patch file. All new handset data will go directly into the core WURFL.

The updated WURFL is available through the WURFL project page.

mobalean is a strong believer in open source.  Collaboration and sharing are at the core of our philosophy.  So we are proud to announce three contributions to the developer community: a WURFL patch file containing about 700 Japanese handsets, a ruby script for parsing the Japanese carrier data and converting it to the WURFL patch file format, and a major update to the ruby WURFL api.

The WURFL is an XML file containing mobile device information such as supported markup types, screen dimensions, and flash lite support.  While the WURFL has a lot of devices in it, including some Japanese ones, the data for them is both poor in quality, and incomplete.  To remedy this, mobalean has created a WURFL patch containing data on all handsets available from the major Japanese carriers (docomo, au, and SoftBank). 

This patch contains data on approximately 700 handsets and has the carrier values for the WURFL capabilities resolution_height, resolution_width, max_image_width, colors, brand_name, model_name, flash_lite_version, xhtml_table_support, and preferred_markup.  While the base WURFL contains additional capabilities for some Japanese handsets, the values of these capabilities are often wrong.  Rather than trying to validate the data in the base WURFL, this patch takes a blank slate approach, and ignores the devices in the base WURFL (with the exception of fallbacks).  All the data in this patch comes from the carrier's official data, and as such is believed to be correct.

mobalean releases this patch to the community in the hope that other members of the community can help improve it.  As with the base WURFL, you are free to use this patch in any manner you so choose.  Our only request is that if you improve the data within, that you also contribute back this data.  Additionally, we hope this patch can eventually be merged back into the core WURFL so that all WURFL users may benefit from it.

To generate this patch, we scraped the carriers' data using a ruby script.  The script transforms the data into an intermediary result, and from that result into a WURFL patch file.  In addition to the WURFL patch file, we have also released our parsing script.  By open sourcing this script, we believe others in the Japanese mobile community, even those who are not using the WURFL, can benefit.  Additionally, we hope that modifications to the WURFL patch be made via this script instead of directly to the patch.  This way, we believe we can more easily keep the patch up to date with new handsets.

In the process of generating the patch, we wanted a way to test the resultant patch file.  We did not want to parse the XML directly, as that would not take in to account the fallback structure.  So we turned to the ruby WURFL API, but found that it did not work out of the box.  As no one else was currently maintaining this API, we decided to take over it.  In doing so, we've turned it into a ruby gem, and have released version 1.1.0 of it.  We hope that this new, easier to install version will encourage further WURFL development within the ruby community.

mobalean hopes these contributions will be useful to other developers.  If you have any questions about these projects, or anything else, don't hesitate to contact us.

I will give a quick presentation on mobile video in Japan at the next Tokyo 2.0 (March 9).  The presentation will highlight some of the issues faced with mobile video on Japanese handsets, describe some existing mobile video services, and introduce a mobile video service created by mobalean.  I hope to see you there.

It's been a busy six weeks getting mobalean up and running. 

Incorporating in Japan is relatively easy and cheap. If you can speak Japanese and are able to register your seal (hanko), you can probably do this work yourself. The whole process took us about a month to complete. 

Apart from setting up the company, we've been pursuing development contracts and participating in community events. Since the beginning of the year, we've helped MoMo with their event organization, done system admin work for TLUG and gave a presentation at Ninjava. We intend to continue participating in these events and continue our work in the development community. 

As a development company, mobalean needs to keep learning and developing new technology. Sharing is part of this process, so we will post our findings and other experiences on this blog and also use the wiki for more technical details.

Cheers!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last Thursday, I gave a presentation at Ninjava on mobile web development in Japan. Although Ninjava usually has about 20 attendees, this time it had over forty. As this was my first presentation since university, the large crowd was a little intimidating.

However, I think it served as a good opportunity to get the word out about mobalean, and particularly about our wiki for Japanese mobile development. As I mentioned during the presentation, there are not so many resources for mobile development in Japan, especially in English. Though our wiki is still in its infancy, I believe it will grow into a valuable resource over the coming months.

In addition, it was a chance to meet other mobile developers. In response to a question, we generated a simple page that allows you to see the headers for a request. This can be useful for debugging as the carriers often set special headers for mobile requests. To try it out, go to http://www.mobalean.com/tools/headers or use the following QR Code:

By the way, this QR Code was generated by the Google Chart API.

Thanks to everyone who attended the presentation, I hope you enjoyed it.  Our slides are available for download here.

The mobalean blog is now live.

In this blog we will write about the experiences of starting a tech company (mobalean in this case, as you might have guessed) in Japan. We'll cover the technical and business side, and try to throw in the specialities of Japan.

For the techies, a little bit more about this blog: it runs Typo 5.2 with Ruby Enterprise Edition behind mod_passenger in Apache. I chose to branch Typo for that purpose and add it to our own git repository to be able to track changes more easily...