Eliminate Fragmentation Frustration with Netbiscuits

Editor's Note: This article was contibuted by Dynetic Mobile Solutions, Inc.

s a mobile developer, you are no doubt familiar with the litany of problems created by the fragmented mobile market:

• A lack of a standardized mark-up language for mobile devices means different devices support different mark-up languages (HTML, XHTML, WML). Even network carriers may have requirements on which markup-language can be used in their network.
• Different devices support different audio, video, and image formats, forcing you to transcode your existing application files for each device’s capabilities.
• For each device you wish to support, you must adapt your application for display sizes and other parameters of each mobile device.
• Limitations on the file size for downloading web pages, depending on the capabilities of each mobile device.

To handle all these problems, not only do you need excellent programming skills (to build applications that support different mark-up languages), you also need an infrastructure that transcodes media files. Your major problem is determining the which mark-up language, media format, and parameters each device supports.

Enter Netbiscuits
There are a few organizations dedicating time to solving these problems. The LiMo Foundation is trying to bring together players from the whole mobile ecosystem to collaborate on one standard platform. This is an ambitious project. Netbiscuits' solution doesn't depend on mobile market fragmentation or consolidation. It's an online platform for professional mobile web development and deployment, based on a standardized, modular approach aimed to dramatically speed and improve mobile web development.

The Netbiscuits platform includes a database that collects the above-mentioned parameters for more than 5,000 mobile devices and newly released devices are constantly being added to the database.

The most important benefits you can reap from using Netbiscuits are:

1. You won't need to think about different mobile devices anymore—Netbiscuits does it for you. You just write once, and run it with every phone.
2. You can use the backend framework of your choice. It doesn't matter if it is Java-, PHP-, or .NET-based. You only need to deliver valid BiscuitML-Code to the Netbiscuits server.
3. You can use whatever IDE you like, it doesn't effect the work of Netbiscuits.

Sixt: A Case Study
Netbiscuits was engaged to develop a mobile portal for Sixt, the leading car rental company in Germany, to allow consumers to book a car using virtually any mobile handset worldwide. The functionality for the mobile portal was expected to be similar to the existing homepage, sixt.com. The portal had to provide customer login for business and non-business customers and the complete booking process for rental cars in eight different languages.

The first challenge was to transform the existing booking pages and the application flow into a storyboard that would match the requirements for all mobile devices. The small display screen and missing JavaScript support in many mobile devices were of particular concern.

Using Netbiscuits

Figure 1. The Sixt Application: The architecture of the Sixt application.

There are two types of applications you can develop using Netbsicuits:

• Standard Hosted Applications: These apps are set-up, managed, and hosted on the Netbiscuits Web service and easily built with a drag-and-drop online site builder.
• Custom API Applications: These apps are developed with the BiscuitML mark-up language (more on this shortly). They are set up on a customer’s application server and connect to Netbiscuits’ universal mobile media adaptation and delivery API.

Sixt chose the Custom API approach because they needed the ablity to connect to various interfaces, as well as to implement a lot of application logic within the portal.

Figure 1 shows the architecture of the Sixt application.

The data exchange between Netbiscuits and the backend system is based on Netbiscuits' own mark-up language, or BiscuitML. BiscuitML uses "Biscuits," which are self-adapting user-interface units (rendering blocks) for web display on mobile devices. Biscuits allow the content to automatically fit more than 5,000 mobile devices worldwide.