App Model for serving non-webkit (BlackBerry) devices?

[Bucs]

We are finding that support of existing BlackBerry devices is VERY important in the sales process when creating mobile sites for corporate web sites. Sencha is shining well beyond the competition for allowing us to "mobilize" corporate web sites, however, we now need to refactor our engine to incorporate serving graceful downgrades to non-webkit browsers.

Is anybody else dealing with this issue at the moment? What is the recommended strategy here? We need a way to check the user agent and deliver either a Touch site or a downlevel non-webkit site. But this has to be done on the server as there is no need to deliver the main Touch page with all the script tag references to source files if the browser won't even use them. So, we are thinking the Controller on the server side uses the UserAgent to determine which app page to load. From there, the Touch app can do it's normal UI Ajax requests and the non-webkit app can do URL requests with Ajax for HTML as needed.

Does this sound appropriate? Any better ideas here? Thanks...

[mrsunshine]

yeah, thats a way you can handle it on your server side

[ariya]

You can also do it in the client side. For example, start with the "basic" app for the legacy, non-webkit devices and when your script detects that the running device supports fancy webkit features, then switch to the real Touch-based app.

But I agree, doing it on the server side seems to give much better use of the bandwidth.

[Bucs]

Back end is the way to do this as you are going to need pretty serious list of devices and capabilities to serve up the right experience, and no way you want to bring all that down to the clinet. So depending on your backend, you should look for a tool to do the heavy lifting. I am using ASP.NET MVC and am looking into 51Degrees.Mobi (http://51degrees.codeplex.com/) which looks very promising, OpenSource too. But there are quite a few out there.