Tera-WURFL 2.1.0

I’m just about to release Tera-WURFL 2.1.0 (Stable) and I thought I’d give you an idea of what to expect. I was originally positioning this as a minor update (i.e. 2.0.1), but decided to make it a minor version upgrade because it adds a lot of functionality and includes a few more settings than version 2.0.0.

Here’s what’s new:

• Experimental support for Microsoft SQL Server 2005 / 2008: with the MSSQL2005 Database Connector, you can now use MS SQL Server as a Tera-WURFL backend! The support is experimental for now, although I’ve put it through my barrage of over 45,000 user agents and it works properly. The Reduction in String stored procedure still needs to be optimized since I just ported it from MySQL 5 to T-SQL. The MSSQL backend is considerably slower than MySQL, and I believe it’s that procedure slowing it down.
• SimpleDesktop Matching Engine: Tera-WURFL wasn’t originally designed to differentiate between desktop and mobile browsers (either was WURFL for that matter), but with this release I’ve introduced the SimpleDesktop Matching Engine which, when enabled, uses keywords and regular expressions to detect 90% of desktop browsers without having to resort to searching the database for a matching WURFL entry. In my tests performance increased by 176% for detection of 45,000 actual unique user agents (both mobile and non-mobile). This feature also dramatically decreases the number of items in your cache by using a single cache item for all desktop browsers.
• Capabilities Filter: I’ve been meaning to implement the Capability Filter for a long time, but two very high traffic clients of mine convinced me to sit down and get it finished. This adds a new setting in TeraWurflConfig.php called CAPABILITY_FILTER. If you set it to false it will be disabled and all the capabilities in the WURFL will be stored in the database and available to your scripts (this is the pre-2.1.0 behavior). Here’s where the magic starts, you can set it to an array of the capabilities and groups of capabilities that you want to store and use, for example, if you just want the know what kind of device is visiting your site and whether or not it’s wireless, you can use this filter:

public static $CAPABILITY_FILTER = array(
  "brand_name",
  "model_name",
  "is_wireless_device"
);

This will shrink your device database by more than a factor of 10. I tested the filter with 20 capabilities against 45,000 unique user agents and it reduced the size of the cache from 645MB (without filtering) to 92MB (with filtering), then down to 24MB with both filtering and SimpleDesktop.

You can look forward to the Tera-WURFL 2.1.0 release around February 10, 2010.

Tera-WURFL is available at its usual location, http://www.Tera-WURFL.com/