Mobile thoughts: an interview with the father of WURFL, Luca Passani

A new interview is on line. I had the pleasure to interview Luca Passani from Openwave, the Leading Provider of Products and Services for the Communications Industry (rumors said that they invented WAP :) ).
You know, my first mini interview is with designer Juri Pratesi (Kurai.it) about his experience on mobile game designing at MicroForum International company.

This time I wanted to hear the point of view from a experienced developer involved into mobile ecosystem.  So I interviewed the man who created the WURFL, the most famous  open-source framework to multiserve Wireless Applications. He gave us his practical point of view on the future of Flash Lite, speak about mobile fragmentation, his meeting with Bill Perry and more.
Anyway I don't want to stole your time so don't miss this great  interview with Luca Passani - Openwave.

Marco : Can you introduce yourself and your company ?

My name is Luca Passani.
I work for Openwave. The reason why many know me in the mobile space is the WURFL project.
Since WURFL is an open-source project, some may wonder what this has to do with a commercial company like Openwave.
In fact, there is  a tight connection. Openwave was one of the founders of the WAP Forum. We were called  Phone.com at the time. We basically invented WAP back in 1998.  Openwave has always been central in the mobile industry with its browser and with its carrier infrastructure. The company has been supporting mobile developers all the way since its inception. WURFL falls in the tradition of such support.

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Marco : What is your job description at Openwave ?

I joined the Openwave consultant organization very recently. I found this a great way to mature: it's a lot more challenging than my previous role.
But I wouldn't be telling the truth if I denied that I enjoyed my previous position at developer marketing a lot.
My job was to be friend with developers, which implied the possibility to expense all the beer I wanted, as long as I was not the only one drinking it.

Marco :  Why and when did you decide to start the WURFL open-source project?

WURFL was born in January 2002 on the WMLProgramming mailing list on Yahoo groups.
I was still living in Copenhagen at the time. Those were the days when Openwave had decided to open-source OUI, a developer tool to support different flavors of WML. My job at the company was to support third-party developers. I intended to keep supporting OUI for some time, but there was a problem: the arrival of XHTML MP in WAP had made the OUI abstractions a bit too stiff to manage the new mark-up easily. For this reason, I was playing with the idea of starting  it all from scratch.
When someone suggested the idea of a configuration file for devices, I recognized
the potential immediately: I drove the initiative, transferred the OUI experience in it and gathered a developer community to support the whole thing.
4 years down the road I can say that I and Andrea Trasatti (the WURFL maintainer)  were as  succesful as we could be. 

Marco : Do you see Flash Lite as the technology that the industry is waiting for to universalize mobile development ?

The short answern to such a blunt question is "no, I don't."
The long answer is way more complicated, though.
I have huge respect for Flash as a platform and for the huge developer community around it. I do believe that Flash Lite can grab a cospicuos chunk of the device market and show the world some nice applications.
Will it conquer the world? I don't think so. At least not in a 2 to 4 years perspective. The problem is that there are a few big obstacles in front of Flash Lite. The biggets one is that it takes a pretty powerful device to run Flash without depleting the battery before you come home at
night.
Another problem is that there are not that many devices around, at least in US  and Europe. This means that, while developing mobile Flash can seem cheap, it is still expensive when compared the number of clients it will run on.
A less obvious, but more serious, obstacle to the adoption of Flash Lite is the fact that it tends to cut operators out of the business of managing the content and the device UIs in their domain.  Operators don't like this.
To add to that, device manufacturers aren't very keen on allowing such an important bit of  software to take over. Is this a surprise?
it shouldn't be. Just look at how long Microsoft has been trying to get their software on as many devices as possible, with limited success. Last, but not least, it appears that even Flash Lite is not managing to be the great standardized environment its bigger brother has become on the
web: not only are devices different because of screen size and number of softkeys, but there is already an issue with different flash-enabled devices supporting different APIs and different  versions of the player.

Marco:  Are you considering building Flash Lite support into WURLF ?

This is an interesting question. The answer is no, in the sense that  I am not personally doing anything in the area, but the answer is also yes, because there are people that are building a Flash lite WURFL as we speak.
A little bit over one year ago, I met Bill Perry of Macromedia in San Francisco. He wanted to talk to me about this problem they were having with  managing different flash-enable devices and the question was whether WURFL could help. My advice to Bill at the time was simple. There  were just a handful of devices out at the time. In addition, Macromedia had a tight connection
with Nokia and other device manufacturers. I told Bill that the way to go was UAprof and having Flash-lite info integrated with that standard.
Bill's body language was telling me that things may not have been as simple. A few months later, a guy called Mike Sheetal in Japan took contact with me and Andrea. He was seriously  considering using WURFL to address the  fragmentation problem, which appeared to be exactly the same as before, possibly bigger. This activity is still going on. There may be some  interactions with our plan to modularize the WURFL. There could be a nice Flashlite WURFL at some point. I'll keep you posted.

Marco : How do you think developers can overcome mobile fragmentation ?

In short, they can't. Mobile devices are different and they will always be.
This industry is hypocritical in nature: everyone talks about convergence in public, but finds way to differentiate the mminute they walk back to their offices. Also, no matter how much you want to converge, there will always be newer devices, with newer formats running new content on devices with different screen sizes.
Of course, the fact that developers can't overcome device fragmentation does not mean that they shouldn't deal with it. WURFL is one way to deal with it, but it's not the only one. Dealing with fragmentation properly might also be a way to gain a competitive advantage.

Marco : Can Flash Lite reduce fragmentation as compared to J2ME ?

No, quite the opposite. As I said, Flashlight won't take over the whole world by itself any time soon. This means that it will have to co-exhist with MIDP1 and MIDP2.
In a way, this increases fragmentation. In another way, though, this is  not exactly the case. All high-end devices that can run Flash can typically also run J2ME Midlets. This pretty much  makes the two technologies complementary: as a developer, you are free to choose the tool that is best suited for the job.
A graphic idle screen is better implemented with Flash. On the other hand, J2ME is probably a better choice for a data intensive application.  The again, graphics and animation can be made with both tools. What you choose in this case pretty much depends on what you know from before. Since you dragged me into this discussion, there's a pair of competing technologies
to both J2ME and Flash coming up. One is obviously Ajax: a lot of what Flash and Java can do at the cost of scripting. The second technology is probably a bit premature to mention, but since it comes from Openwave and it fills my company heart with pride, here you go: Openwave MIDAS (Mobile Integrated Dynamic Application System) is a scripted application environment that lets operators manage the device UIs of their subscribers, including pushing new applications to the phones out there. Without going into too much details, creating MIDAS apps is as simple as
using  scripts and mark-up, yet the new platform doesn't have a lot of the shortcomings that both J2ME and Flash have, when it comes to doing business with operators.
Can your Flash/J2ME application totally integrate with the device functions (messaging, address book, IM)? can you stream content to the device when the subscriber is not using it? can your portal remain active also while you are off-line?
MIDAS can do this and more.

Marco:  What's your view on the future of mobile (Mobile TV, Mobile 2.0, Mobile
Web browsing ..) ?

That's may questions in one. Wrt Mobile TV. I don't know. It could be a success or it could  be a failure, or even something in the middle. I personally don't like the idea of watching TV on a phone, but then again I am not your average consumer. I wouldn't be surprised if Mobile TV was a success in a region (say, Asia) and a total failure some place else (say, Italy). The price of the service will also play a big role.
What is Mobile 2.0? is it connected to Web 2.0? If it is, please define Web 2.0 for me and I may try to answer.
As far as Mobile Web Browsing goes, I think it is here to stay, even though there is more money to be made in other areas (ringtones, wallpapers, games).

Marco:  What are your thoughts on Flash Lite ?

I like it. It's powerful. It's easy. There's one trillion people using it.
If you know Flash from before, Flashlite is a really cheap ticket to the world of mobile content.

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Comments

[Steve]

I thought Laszlo Nadai had the original idea and design of WURFL, not Luca. Or ?

[Luca Passani]

Steve, why don't you come and ask the same question on WMLProgramming?

Luca

[I think the comment on sept 23. 2006 is right LASZLO NADAI is the founder of WURFL I know that for]

I know Laszlo Nadai is the founder of WURFL I was there when the idea was created and heard Luca Passani calling him several times on the phone asking him advises etc. PLEASE LUCA help us out HERE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
My husband worked a lot on that FREE project.
Thanks,
agnes

[agnes]

something is wrong with your comment structure Luca Passani didn't post anything just moments ago Is someone watching our Internet activities I think no one does that.