July 2010
Intermediate to advanced
510 pages
13h 31m
English
Content preview from Programming the Mobile WebBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 10. Server-Side Browser Detection and Content Delivery
Until now, this book has only discussed the client side of mobile web development. Server-side development has an especially important part to play here, though, not only because of all we know about dynamic content generation, but because the server is the only place where we can easily make decisions about what content to send to which devices.
In this chapter we will look at device detection and content delivery, and introduce the creation of a content store. The server also manages the MIME types of content, a very important feature we need to define for good compatibility in the mobile world.
Note
We can use any server-side platform, server, and/or programming language. For the purposes of clarity our samples will use PHP, although this chapter will provide short tips for ASP.NET and Java as well. You can easily export these techniques to any other server platform.
Mobile Detection
Before talking about detection of mobile devices and services on the server, we need to go back a bit and consider an old friend: the HyperText Transfer Protocol, also known as HTTP. Knowing a bit about its internals will help us determine what we can do in terms of mobile web development.
Note
There are no special server requirements for mobile websites; you can just use the same Apache, Internet Information Server (IIS), or other server you are currently using for desktop websites.
HTTP
HTTP is a protocol originally defined in 1991 for document ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.