Tag: http

It’s often important for a server side application to understand the client platform. There are two common methods used for this.

1. On the client itself, “capabilities” can be tested.
2. Unfortunately, the server cannot easily test these, and as such must usually rely upon the HTTP Header information, notably “User-Agent”.

Example User-agent might typically look like this for a common desktop browser, developers can usually determine the platform without a lot of work.

"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/4.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E; InfoPath.3)"

Determining robots and mobile platforms, unfortunately is a lot more difficult due to the variations. Libraries as those described below simplify this work as standard Java Objects expose the attributes that are commonly expected.

With Maven, the dependencies are all resolved with the following POM addition:

<dependency>
<groupid>net.sf.uadetector</groupid>
<artifactid>uadetector-resources</artifactid>
<version>2014.10</version>
</dependency>



/* Get an UserAgentStringParser and analyze the requesting client */
final UserAgentStringParser parser = UADetectorServiceFactory.getResourceModuleParser();
final ReadableUserAgent agent = parser.parse(request.getHeader("User-Agent"));

out.append("You're a '");
out.append(agent.getName());
out.append("' on '");
out.append(agent.getOperatingSystem().getName());
out.append("'.");


As indicated on the website documentation, running this query for each request uses valuable server resources, it’s best to cache the responses to minimize the impact!

http://uadetector.sourceforge.net/usage.html#improve_performance

NOTE: the website caching example is hard to copy-paste, here’s a cleaner copy.


/*
* COPYRIGHT.
*/
package com.example.cache;

/**
* @return {@code String}
*/
@Override
public String getDataVersion() {
return parser.getDataVersion();
}
/**
* @param userAgentString {@code String}
* @return {@link ReadableUserAgent}
*/
@Override
public ReadableUserAgent parse(final String userAgentString) {
ReadableUserAgent result = cache.getIfPresent(userAgentString);
if (result == null) {
result = parser.parse(userAgentString);
cache.put(userAgentString, result);
}
return result;
}
/**
*
*/
@Override
public void shutdown() {
parser.shutdown();
}
}


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