Volantis releases open-source mobile Internet toolkit

Mobile Web developers can make use of a new open source toolkit, released this week by Volantis Systems.

The Volantis Mobility Server (formerly called Framework) can now be downloaded under the GNU General Public License version 3. The Java-based software is a framework for building Web applications for mobile devices. The applications automatically is recast on the fly to adapt specifically to whatever device is accessing the Web content.

The approach tackles the same type of problem as a technique called transcoding, but does more expansively. Transcoding takes one markup language and converts it to another, says Watson. Some approaches made use of the Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation (XSLT) standard to convert XML documents from one format to another. "XSLT is not a programming language," says Watson. "To do the kind of one-to-many conversions as we do, requires very complex coding, and XSLT is just not up to that."