Wapple has announced it is unveiling Wapple Architect, which is claimed to enable developers to quickly mobilize existing PC web applications and create new mobile services that integrate existing data and content.
"Architect is a ground breaking technology that integrates at the very heart of an existing web application, unlike transcoding systems," claimed Rich Holdsworth, CTO at Wapple.
Only 50% of traditional websites can be viewed via mobile, the other 50% provide a poor user experience because they have not been designed for mobile devices. Wapple Architect is claimed to dramatically cut the time and cost of mobilizing web applications and delivering rich multimedia mobile content. And because Wapple's device profiler automatically recognises the characteristics of any mobile device, the application and content instantly repurposes to work on the thousands of different handset and software combinations on the market. This eliminates the need for manual device or browser profiling or developing multiple versions that have held back the growth of the mobile internet, says Wapple.
"There is growing demand for good quality mobile applications and content, but developers have been faced with the impossible task of supporting more than 50,000 device and software variants," says Holdsworth. "The result is that many have either used crude transcoding to deliver very basic content or spent weeks developing different sites for different phones. With Wapple Architect, developers simply build it once and let Wapple's delivery engine do the rest."
At the heart of Architect is Wapple's 'unique', easy-to-understand XML-based mark-up language, WAPL (Wapple Application Programming Language). This enables the development of genuine device independent applications that can be written in any language and output in WAPL.
WAPL works in the same way as HTML/XHTML for websites and applications. Once WAPL files have been added, Wapple's web services will detect if a mobile device is being used to access the site and output WAPL as the view file.
The Wapple Exhibit device profiler and delivery engine provides dynamic and intelligent optimisation so that applications and domains developed using Wapple Architect are accurately rendered not just for all of the devices in use now but from the moment a new device or update is launched onto the market.
"More than 100 new device and software combinations appear every month," Holdsworth continued, "By using Wapple Architect, developers are future-proofing their mobile applications. Our delivery technology simply identifies new device properties the moment they are used and presents content in the right way. The correct mark-up language is delivered, logos and other images are never distorted or in the wrong colour, navigation is presented in the most appropriate way and only content the device is able to handle is displayed and adapted to the screen size."
A beta version of Wapple Architect is available from today.