On Mon, 25 Feb 2002, Michael Turner wrote:
> It's this: Data is not enough. Nor are tools in themselves
> enough. The right license might be important, but it's
> just meta-data about the system. An open source solution
> has to incorporate tools, plus data --- phone descriptions --
> that other (perhaps proprietary) tools can get started
> with quickly, under license terms and under a source
> management regime that doesn't inhibit or intimidate
> people from using it or contributing to it.
The way I see is this. The most important part is still
the data. When you have the data stored collected and
stored the rest is "just" writing the classes which
implement the methods for identifying the handset
and returning corresponding data.
IMO the big question in here is how the data should
be distributed. Having it hardcoded inside the class
is easy way to go (as in Imode_User_Agent.php), but
it won't live too far and it would be awkward to keep
all implementations in different languages up to date.
Having the data stored in a database server is a nice
and fast way to store data, but who wants host the database?
So my conclusion is the data could be distributed in
text/xml files. If one wants, this data could be then imported
to various databases locally where the application is run, or
used as is.
--
Mika Tuupola http://www.appelsiini.net/~tuupola/
Received on Mon Feb 25 17:37:46 2002