Wurfl

WURFL stands for Wireless Universal Resource File. It is part of a FOSS (which stands for Free and Open Source Software) community effort focused on the problem of presenting content on the wide variety of wireless devices. The WURFL itself is an XML configuration file which contains information about device capabilities and features for a variety of mobile devices. Device information is contributed by developers around the world and the WURFL is updated frequently reflecting new wireless devices coming on the market. Luca Passani is the driving force behind WURFL.

At the end of 1999 the first WAP phone was launched in Europe, followed by many others in the following months. By 2001 it became clear that WAP devices exhibited significant differences in the way they handled WAP content. The implication of this was that mobile developers found it difficult to support the increasing numbers of devices; the cost of application development, cost of testing and the cost of the very devices made WAP development expensive as compared to web development. Eventually, some developers realized that they could leverage the open-source model for their efforts. Luca Passani and Andrea Trasatti joined forces to build a community around a shared repository of device capability information, which they named WURFL. Over the years the project has gained followers and supporters from different geographical regions and with different backgrounds. The first basic API was in Perl. Java and PHP libraries appeared shortly afterwards, soon followed by a better .NET Framework, Perl version, Ruby, and, more recently, Python, XSLT and C++.