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About Tera-WURFL
Tera-WURFL is a PHP & MySQL based library that uses the Wireless Universal Resource File (WURFL). The WURFL website nicely defines the WURFL as follows:
The WURFL is an "ambitious" configuration file that contains info about all known Wireless devices on earth. Of course, new devices are created and released at all times. While this configuration file is bound to be out of date one day after each update, chances are that the WURFL lists all of the WAP devices you can purchase in the nearest shops.
Tera-WURFL takes some functionality from the original PHP Tools Library by Andrea Trasatti and a prerelease version of the Java WURFL Evolution by Luca Passani. It serves as a drop in replacement for the original PHP Tools with only minor changes to your existing code. Since Tera-WURFL uses a database backend (MySQL4, MySQL5, MSSQL is experimental), the real world performance increase over the existing PHP Tools implementation is extremely high; normally between 5x and 10x faster!
The author of Tera-WURFL is Steve Kamerman, a professional PHP Programmer, MySQL DBA, Flash/Flex Actionscript Developer, Linux Administrator, IT Manager and part-time American Soldier. This project was originally sponsored by Tera Technologies and was developed as an internal project used for delivering content to customers of the mobile ringtone and image creation site Tera-Tones.com.
WALL4PHP Support
With the release of WALL4PHP 1.1 (the Wireless Abstraction Library), Kaspars Foigts has been nice enough to add support for Tera-WURFL. As of Tera-WURFL 2.0, a modified version of WALL4PHP that is designed to work with Tera-WURFL is available in the 'Downloads' section.
Online Demo
Check out Tera-WURFL in action before you even install it! I've put a couple demos up for you, check 'em out:
Demo #1: Tera-WURFL identifying over 800 devices in real time
This demo churns through my database of unique user agents / http headers and attempts to identify every device. As of version 1.5.0, Tera-WURFL now uses a caching system to increase performance and decrease server load. As of version 2.0, Tera-WURFL uses many User Agent Matchers to apply specifiy detection methods to specific brands of devices. This greatly increases detection accuracy. Version 2.0 also introduces the Levenshtein Distance algorithim to better detect ambiguous user agents.
Demo #2: Tera-WURFL Web Administration
This is the web administration page that comes with Tera-WURFL. It allows you to update the WURFL database over the Internet (or locally), update your database with your custom patch file and test your current configuration with manually entered user agents.
Demo #3: Tera-WURFL Manual Test Script
This script is very similar to the "check_wurfl.php" script used in the standard PHP Tools library.
Download, Installation, Support
The following pages will guide you through downloading, installing, configuring and extending Tera-WURFL:
- Download
- Installation
- Support
