Let me introduce my latest and greatest software: Tera-WURFL! What the heck is that?!?! Well, ‘Tera’ is just plain cool because it comes from Tera Technologies :) and WURFL is the ‘Wireless Universal Resource FiLe. After a while of testing the WURFL PHP Tools by Andrea Trasatti, I began to notice some major downfalls in the package’s performance. Although the authors did all they could do to make it as fast as possible, the package still uses a file based caching method (albeit a fast one) so store device information. I found the lack of database support disturbing and decided to rewrite the class in my free time and release it myself [:)]. So here it is - Tera-WURFL. My version uses MySQL >= 4.1 and PHP >= 4.3 and performs up to 15x faster than the file based version! I am currently tied down trying to make non-free software and other things so I don’t have a whole lot of extra time to work on Tera-WURFL - sorry.
Basically, this software sits on your webserver and when a web browser requests your site, Tera-WURFL determines whether it’s a desktop web browser or a mobile WAP device, and if it is a mobile device it gives you a TON of information about it like the Make, Model, Screen Size, Ringtone Formats, Image Formats, etc… It’s really quite increadible!
Oh yeah - Tera-Tones.com also uses this detection method to deliver rich media content to handheld devices.