Re: using mobileok-checker

Hi Matt,

I am not member of the mobileok development team, so you can consider my 
point of view as objective. In my project, we have been using mobileok 
checker for quite some time, introducing some changes in order to add 
our own XSL tests.

a. It is stable enough since the alpha release (one year ago).  In 
earlier versions we had some problems (with the 0.01% of the pages) 
because some pages were cauisng the checker to throw an unexpected 
exception and fail.
In my opinion, the code is also readable and understandable.  That makes 
your development a lot easier.

b. The support in this forum has been highly satisfactory in my case, 
with Sean Owen and Dom (among others) answering questions and even 
solving those problems above in less than 24 hours.

c. We also needed to check each linked page, so we modified mobileok to 
define some non-visible classes and methods as public (i.e. Preprocessor 
class) to be called from our code (as the 
org.w3c.mwi.mobileok.basic.Tester class does) :

    mobileok <- third party application

In my opinion, this is the major drawback for third party projects to 
interact with the "mobileok core".  Now, I think a better approach would 
have been to keep mobileOk as it is, and use the moki XML files to 
interact with it. Maybe this approach is easier to mantain in the long run :

    mobileok -> moki <- third party application

If you look for the message "Some thougths about mobileok checker" 
(2007/10/15), Sean Owen said :

In general I'm reluctant to open up classes and methods to public access that don't need to be public. The code was not necessarily written to be extended at the code level, since it defines a specific behavior of tests and should not need to be changed regularly by third parties. One can use the "moki" XML output of the Tester, which contains all information about the document, and build another application on top of that.


The moki file contains the links in the page, so you can easily extract 
and check them.  From my experience, if you plan to in-depth crawl a lot 
of pages, think about using a thread pool and about an effective way to 
store the pending links (those to be checked) and the already crawled 
ones, as the number of links tend to grow exponentially and you could 
find some issues if you keep them in memory.

Hope that helps,
guido.

Matt Maths escribió:
> Hi
>
> I would appreciate some help. We are looking to build an internal validation tool that automatically validates our mobile content on test servers. The kind of information we want to validate is
> xhtml compliance
> profanity
> spell check
> reference to external links
> redirects
> some basic content compliance (such as headers and footers)
> and some other tests......
>
> I wanted to find out
> a. Is using mobileok-checker mature enough for us ( a third party) to build a test tool based on it?
> b. Can we expect some support from this forum, such as if we run a implementation idea here or if we are getting an error?
> c. We would like to implement a tool, that not only tests the main page of the site, but also bots down to all links and checks each page (i.e. runs tests on each page). What is the best way to achieve this?
>
> I would appreciate if you can answer my questions so that we can make right decisions
>
> thanks
>
> Matt

Received on Tuesday, 7 October 2008 08:13:28 UTC