We’re living with our cell phones. Wherever we go all these portable devices are with us. We are more mobile these days.
With all these devices and the situation that covers us, we made an eternal market: Mobile Data Synchronization. Actually, for years, some players -really big ones- are already playing in this market. In this article, I’m gonna show you how you can build your own synchronization service with PHP5.
Synchronization process with a mobile device works via an OMA -Open Mobile Alliance- standart, SyncML. SyncML -Synchronization Markup Language- defines a protocol to mobile client and synchronization server talk to each other. But if you want to speak SyncML you need to understand WBXML -WAP Binary XML- first. WBXML is a binary representation of XML. As SyncML, WBXML was developed by OMA for XML transmission between mobile client and synchronization server.
As you can see, we’re going to handle and parse WBXML contents. So, let’s get ready our development environment:
# apt-get install php5 php5-dev php-pear libwbxml2-0 libwbxml2-0-dev libwbxml2-0-utils
All these modules will be required to run next command:
# pecl install WBXML
When you install this PECL extension correctly you will be able to call wbxml to xml methods. Thus, you will be able to parse synchronization data with your PHP script.
Now you can design your own application to synchronize mobile devices with your synchronization server.