We ♥ web applications!
At mobalean we love to build innovative web services for Japan and the world. Our experience will help transform your ideas into successful online services.
At mobalean we love to build innovative web services for Japan and the world. Our experience will help transform your ideas into successful online services.
Mobalean is lead by Henri Servomaa, the original founder and mobile developer. At Mobalean we strive to develop services which are loved by our clients and users. By working in an agile manner, quickly adapting to changing requirements, we can deliver quickly and often.
Hailing from Finland, Henri has a long history with computers and the internet. With a background in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, he has worked in Japan as Software Developer and System Admin since 2001. In 2005, he joined a company to develop mobile sites for the Japanese market and has been involved in mobile ever since.
Cleve Lendon is a Canadian engineer who has been contracting for Mobalean. He came to Tokyo in 1994, and has lived here ever since. He has broad experience as a software developer, which includes development of mainframe software, Internet applications and mobile apps (Android and iOS). He is especially skilled at writing Java applications (vd. Simredo 4, Grafikilo 15). When not programming, Cleve enjoys improv acting and studying languages, such as Latin and Esperanto.
Our strength is crafting web services for both Japanese and international markets. We bring our technical and cultural experience to help you adapt your ideas into successful products.
We develop with Ruby on Rails and use the best agile practices and tools, such as test driven development and continuous integration to achieve quality.
We are the leading provider of technical expertise about the Japanese mobile web. Mobalean started when the smartphones were just appearing on the market. Our Keitai Web Technology Guide is a quick starting point for learning about the initial challenges of Japanese mobile development. Although the technology stacks have changed since the proliferation of iOS and Android, some of the idiosyncrasies remain. Most notably, the Japanese market is still very much dominated by the big three carriers: DoCoMo, au and Softbank. Developers can find more technical details in our Keitai-Dev Wiki.
Email address: info@mobalean.com
If you prefer to call us, feel free to do so under +81 (0)70-6251-7245
For users of Skype, please call mobalean
mobalean is a strong believer in open source. Collaboration and sharing are at the core of our philosophy. So we are proud to announce three contributions to the developer community: a WURFL patch file containing about 700 Japanese handsets, a ruby script for parsing the Japanese carrier data and converting it to the WURFL patch file format, and a major update to the ruby WURFL api.
The WURFL is an XML file containing mobile device information such as supported markup types, screen dimensions, and flash lite support. While the WURFL has a lot of devices in it, including some Japanese ones, the data for them is both poor in quality, and incomplete. To remedy this, mobalean has created a WURFL patch containing data on all handsets available from the major Japanese carriers (docomo, au, and SoftBank).
This patch contains data on approximately 700 handsets and has the carrier values for the WURFL capabilities resolution_height, resolution_width, max_image_width, colors, brand_name, model_name, flash_lite_version, xhtml_table_support, and preferred_markup. While the base WURFL contains additional capabilities for some Japanese handsets, the values of these capabilities are often wrong. Rather than trying to validate the data in the base WURFL, this patch takes a blank slate approach, and ignores the devices in the base WURFL (with the exception of fallbacks). All the data in this patch comes from the carrier's official data, and as such is believed to be correct.
mobalean releases this patch to the community in the hope that other members of the community can help improve it. As with the base WURFL, you are free to use this patch in any manner you so choose. Our only request is that if you improve the data within, that you also contribute back this data. Additionally, we hope this patch can eventually be merged back into the core WURFL so that all WURFL users may benefit from it.
To generate this patch, we scraped the carriers' data using a ruby script. The script transforms the data into an intermediary result, and from that result into a WURFL patch file. In addition to the WURFL patch file, we have also released our parsing script. By open sourcing this script, we believe others in the Japanese mobile community, even those who are not using the WURFL, can benefit. Additionally, we hope that modifications to the WURFL patch be made via this script instead of directly to the patch. This way, we believe we can more easily keep the patch up to date with new handsets.
In the process of generating the patch, we wanted a way to test the resultant patch file. We did not want to parse the XML directly, as that would not take in to account the fallback structure. So we turned to the ruby WURFL API, but found that it did not work out of the box. As no one else was currently maintaining this API, we decided to take over it. In doing so, we've turned it into a ruby gem, and have released version 1.1.0 of it. We hope that this new, easier to install version will encourage further WURFL development within the ruby community.
mobalean hopes these contributions will be useful to other developers. If you have any questions about these projects, or anything else, don't hesitate to contact us.