About WAFL
From WAFL Wiki
Contents |
What is WAFL?
WAFL is not about waffles. It stands for “Website Adaptation and Formatting Layer”.
The goal of this open-source project is to achieve device-specific content adaptation for content management systems.
OK, English please…
Very well.
Everyone who regularly accesses the Internet from a mobile device will recognize that this still can be rather painful at some points. Known problems are long connection times and websites that are not suitable for viewing on a mobile device. Can you actually believe that? It’s 2009 and we still can’t browse the web decently from a mobile device. With the WAFL Project, we want to help make the mobile web a better place.
We plan to do this by targeting content management systems. Our platform will plug into a CMS and perform the following tasks when a request arrives:
- Detect the connecting device and determine its characteristics.
- Adapt the content specifically for that device. This includes three steps:
- Select an appropriate mobile template and optimize it for that device.
- Adapt the content of the different building blocks of the requested page.
- Trans code multimedia items to minimize bandwidth usage.
- Return an specifically adapted and optimized page to the user.
That’s nice and fancy, but how will you do that in practice?
First of all, we will be extensively using the Siruna-platform because it can already do some of the generic features we discussed in the section above, such as device detection, image transcoding and content adaptation. Because Siruna is mainly aimed at regular websites (and not at content management systems), we plan to “bridge the gap” between a CMS and Siruna. Surely, accessing content from within a CMS can be highly beneficial for content adaptation, since the semantic meaning of content blocks can be much clearer.
We already developed a theoretical architecture that is CMS-independant. Right now, we are working on applying this architecture as generic as possible on a first CMS. We have chosen to start developing a plugin for Joomla!. If this implementation becomes a success, plugins for other CMS’s will follow.
Wow! That’s great! I want to have that!
Thanks. That’s possible, but you’ll have to wait a while. As I said, development is in a very early stage at this point. We plan to release a first alpha version on the 9th of May, 2009. Since this project will be open-source, you’ll be able to experiment with it from that date on. So certainly check back soon!
