RL029 Milen Dyankov on Mobile Device Recognition and "What is a portal?"

Radio Liferay

Please welcome yet another return guest, Milen Dyankov, a fellow trainer and senior consultant in Liferay. Milen has been participating in episode 9 and he has been the original contributor of the mobile device detection code to Liferay. Back then he was a community member, but in the mean time he as joined the team and is now working from Poland and all over (and around) the european continent.

Some more keywords from the conversation:

• Training experiences
• Mobile Device Detection, or Device Recognition as it's labelled on Marketplace
• The UI for DR is not too obvious - which was the original reason for us to have this conversation. Milen describes how to make sense of the UI, how to use it and what features are hidden behind the UI facade
• WURFL and the dimensions of information that it can detect from devices
• The history of his contribution (for 6.0)
• The UI changes in 6.2 have been significantly and will indicate that you'll need to install a plugin to use DR properly (we were not sure and didn't check yet if it's in M6 yet, if/once you see it please give feedback)
• As the UI offers only a selection of the device information: Why we limited the information and what else is available through WURFL
• How to determine if a certain device is a telephone or a tablet (hint: whatever WURFL says is assumed to be correct)
• How to make use of the WURFL capabilities that are not exposed in the UI. Milen promised to post a blog article on it and - in fact - he has already done so.
• Future plans to help with responsive desins
• How DR can be used to serve specific content to devices (e.g. if all you want is to download an App)
• Other mobile strategies:
  • run your own apps (how is that Liferay dependent? Well, take a look at Liferay's Events app (for the upcoming Developer Conference, Liferay Portal Solution Forums or Symposiums) that uses the agenda content directly from the portal, e.g. Liferay's CMS
  • Sync
  • Make use of HTML5 local storage (see the IBA presentation at the 2012 european symposium
• Milen recently got praised for a beautiful presentation he did at a conference, titled "What is a portal?". His motivation and the story behind. (sshhh: He's available for presentations at other events as well)
• Also, we're both showing age remembering Container Managed Persistence from EJB 2 and how Spring and similar libraries have turned the world upside down since then.

Follow Milen, RadioLiferay or me on twitter
Thank you again to Auphonic for improving the sound quality dramatically. AFAIK this time there were no unrecoverable dropouts ;)