At 09:30 AM 9/10/2001 -0500, David Simcik wrote:
>Hey all,
> I'm trying to modify an existing script that searches a test file
> for what
>one could qualify as normal phonebook style entries; name, phone #, email
>addy, etc. We've got an internal presentation coming up in two weeks, and my
>boss would like to WAP-ify this directory for it. That almost certainly
>means moving the app to produce an XML doc of some kind. Ideally, I would
>like to use XSLT to convert the raw XML doc into WML and HTML; to seperate
>data from presentation of course. The Perl script would handle the actual
>search mechanism, any logic required to detect different browsers, and the
>handling of the XSL transformations.
The most comprehensive XSL Transform API for Perl is Matt Sergeant's AxKit.
http://www.axkit.org/. It works with mod_perl and is quite heavily optimized.
>Can anybody provide a few pointers on the best approach to take with this?
>More specifically, any recommended modules that could be used to facilitate
>this? How can I detect different WAP browsers???
You can detect different WAP browsers with an Agent string, but really
there are some guidelines to programming WAP in a fairly cross-browser way.
I've programmed for about 12 different WAP phones and found many of them to
be quite similar with the original Nokia 7110 and Motorola PDA phone being
the biggest offenders and pain in my neck programming.
Caveat: my experiences may not be the same as you may find because I wrote
my apps for use in a GSM market phones in Asia. But if you are in the USA,
your WAP phones may have different quirks than the entire rest of the world.
As a shameless plug, I would direct you to the book Applied Perl edited by
Peter Williams where I've written a chapter on programming WAP applications
using Perl based on my experiences writing WAP and SMS enabled
Web-applications in that market.
Anyway, since all you really want is a demo, I would just download one of
the WAP emulators and just simply code for that emulator and your life will
be much easier than coding some weird XSLT transform. I am of the opinion
that WML is really so completely different and changes your forms so
drastically and what you would want to display and bring back as data, that
a simple XSLT transform is not enough -- you really require logic changes
to the application.
People talk all the time about separation of UI from application code, but
to some degree, the UI medium does have a big effect on the workflow of the
application. For example, in an HTML app, you can often get away with long
parameters passed back and forth but in WML where you might have a single
HTML form split into many WML forms, you have to more readily maintain the
state of the previous forms in your WML application which requires more
session logic.
These things can't really be emulated in a "simple" transform.
Good Luck,
Gunther
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