Everyone knows it. There is nothing worse than a not tailored content. Just think how frustrating is surfing a very complex website on the small screen of your cellular phone. You probably waste your time zooming and scrolling the pages, but, anyway, it’s clear: if you want a comfortable user experience you need dinamically adaptable contents according to hardware and browser specifications of your device.
That’s the reason why Device Description Repositories (DDR) exist. These are databases that store a huge amount of information concerning mobile phones, tablets, Interactive TVs, set top boxes and any device having a Web browser, in order to allow developers to realize applications extremely enjoyable on each client.
Of course, just surfing the web, you can state that there are several and different DDR projects already available. But if you focus your attention on their utilization policies you can find some similitaries: companies which own these projects demand you a fee to access to their databases and APIs, or may let you access for free to these proprietary informations only for developing opensource applications.
In this context, we think a different approach is needed. Day after day we all experience an incredible growth of devices available on the market and, by now, accurately tracking their specs has became a very hard work. But this complexity can be reduced if managed by a community daily involved in improving the DDR, in addition to direct contributions made by major device manufacturers. And this is the essence of OpenDDR project, the only open and completely free repository of device description available worldwide.
To streamline our goals, we decided to rely on an open standard: our repository is fully compliant with W3C DDR and our library implements the W3C DDR Simple APIs.
From a developer point of view, this choice is good for two reasons:
1) You can start developing your application with confidence that your product will work with any W3C DDR Simple APIs implementation, no binding to OpenDDR implementation;
2) Adopting a W3C standard, the Copyright of the interfaces you need is owned and protected by W3C against any intellectual property and patent claim
And the good news does not end there. OpenDDR is released under Open Database License (ODbL), and OpenDDR Simple APIs are released under Lesser General Public License (LGPL). This means that you are completely free to use both OpenDDR repository and/or APIs in open source or proprietary software.
OpenDDR is endorsed by a large developer community, and it is always up-to-date with latest devices launched in the market, distributed on monthly releases.