This article from Sun discusses how to provide a download customized for a particular device automatically so your users don't have to figure out what's right for them. The article is mostly code example. Automatic provisioning is actually pretty easy to do if you're basing your application on the Mobile Information Device Profile (MIDP) and you know a bit about the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). When a browser requests any resource from a web site, it sends a number of headers along with the request. One of these is the User-Agent header, which identifies the "user agent," in this case the browser. There's no standard for what goes into the header, but in general it includes the browser name and version as well as the operating system name and version. Some browsers even send details about the device, such as its screen resolution. You can mine this information, including the values of other HTTP headers, to build a provisioning servlet like the one I present here. |
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