Free V
Personally speaking, I wasn’t surprised to hear yesterday of the announcement from Volantis that they’re planning to open source their server. They join the ranks of Cocoon, WALL and MyMobileWeb in offering a free path to mobile content. Of course, the difference is that Cocoon has the might of Apache behind it, and MyMobileWeb has Telefonica and the support of four EU countries. WALL, of course, has been around for many years, sitting nicely on top of WURFL where it enjoys a certain loyal following.
Mark Watson, their CEO, in a press release referring to mobile applications, says “[t]here’s no way that Volantis, on its own, can hope to build out all those applications.” In contrast, MobileAware has continued to make significant progress in tackling the mobility challenge, and with the right support from partners and timely feedback will continue to build on this progress. Meanwhile, the MobileAware team continues to work with industry standards so that the openness is there where it counts: at the interface between technologies.
While people are looking at the freebies and wondering just how much work might be involved, there’s always a professional solution like WLMS, which was updated just three weeks ago to v3.6SP1 with loads of new goodies for anyone on BEA platforms. Plus, it has been a free try-before-buy download for years! The technology is standards based, so you’ll find it appearing on more than just WebLogic. (For example, the developer edition will run quite happily on Apache Tomcat.)
So, whether you go the free route, or opt for the professional purchase, what’s important is that you go mobile. The free solutions will make it possible for more and more small operations to go mobile, and when they eventually go mainstream, the professional solutions will be there as an option to deal with their new challenges.
Vive la différence!
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