People of WURFL,

it's with great pleasure that I announce the WURFL public interface (AKA
WURFLDB) available at:

http://www.wurflpro.com/

The basic idea is that everyone will be able to look at the latest WURFL
data about specific devices, while some will also be able to contribute
and download a newer WURFL right away.

With "some", I am referring to the trusted group of WURFL contributors
who show their will and knowledge to make WURFL a great resource for
themselves and for the rest of the community.

As you know, one of the biggest issues with opening up WURFL to
everyone's contributions is the need to ensure that WURFL data is
organized properly, with regard to fall-back and other features.
It goes without saying that this would be hard to ensure once everyone
is able to add WURFL data freely.
In order to address this, there are two levels of control:

- I appoint contributors

- While new contributions are immediately available to the contributor
who has submitted them in the form of a brand new wurfl.xml file, I will
need to approve the actual contributions, before they make it to the
master wurfl.xml

So, I guess the question many of you have is "how do I become a
contributor?".
In order to be a contributor you must study (didn't say "read", I said
"study") the contributors' online help:

http://www.wurflpro.com/static/top.htm

which, by the way, is recommended reading also for non-contributors.
Secondly, you can follow the instructions in this document about the
information required to be elected contributor:

http://www.wurflpro.com/static/become_a_contributor.htm

(it's all about sending me an email with some basic info about you and
your work, but please read the document).

Once you are a contributor, you can start adding your device info right
away. Just one word of caution: you may want to add 5 to 10 devices to
start with and allow me to use the next 2 to 4 days to evaluate the
system overall behavior. While testing has, of course, already taken
place, I do not need to explain to you that one should always be ready
for surprises when an application with this scope goes public.
In other words, please do use the system to become familiar with it, but
wait for a few days before you invest a large number of hours adding
tons of device info.

Finally, there are already a bunch of extra features in the pipeline,
but if you have more ideas, feel free to post them here for discussion.

Credits: please take a moment to appreciate the fact that WURFLDB has
been made possible thanks to the sponsorship of AdMob, who has allowed
me to use my time on WURFL.
SourceSense, an Italian company with Open-Source in its DNA, has
contributed the programmers who created the site in the same timespan
that W3C used to decide that the DDR acronym could not easily be
confused with the former German communist republic ;)

Luca

PS: Little aside, I have just placed what is hopefully the last manually
edited WURFL in the usual place on the website:

http://wurfl.sourceforge.net/wurfl.zip