I'm working on a mobile micro site at the moment which needs to deployed on a foreign server so I decided to check out the new WURFL Java API for my profiling requirements. Although I have used the WURFL for over 5 years I have never personally created any production sites using either the API or WALL so my experience was limited to some basic assessment duties.

Downloading the new API, importing it into Eclipse and building it for the first time was an absolute breeze. Luca has done a great job to make this very easy and I felt comfortable moving around the source code checking out the various classes/methods.

Second task was to create a Tomcat application to actually test the code via a browser. We use Spring for all our server side stuff so this was also easy to get up and running. The only issue I had was that the application threw some encoding errors during the Tomcat deployment when I used the WURFL in a zipped format (a new feature). I didn't want to spend time debugging this issue so I went back to the unzipped XML file and it worked immediately.

So after about an hour I had everything running in a browser with the server set-up and configured to my liking and I was able to start testing the new API's profiling performance using Chris Pederick's indispensable user-agent switcher. [PS - a new version of the user-agent switcher just got released in time for Firefox 3.]

Overall I was impressed. It's speedy and works well with even the most obscure devices. It even handled the Novarra transcoder headers without issue. The only real problem I had was that the API doesn't handle Opera Mini's transcoder headers very well but this is a minor issue and is easy to resolve. Definitely my preferred 3rd party choice for doing device profiling when building mobile sites.