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.