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The following sections provide an overview of the Design Studio application and the Cisco Content Transformation Engine (CTE) 1400:
The Cisco Content Transformation Engine (CTE) 1400 Design Studio application creates transformation instructions that convert web pages into a format appropriate for devices such as the following:
This real-time conversion does the following:
Typically, wireless devices are constrained by display size, data input features, and download time. You can exclude and modify web page content by indicating in Design Studio how you want a web page to appear when delivered to wireless devices. Design Studio creates content transformation instructions, referred to as transformation rules, based on your decisions.
Depending on the website you want to transform and the wireless devices you want to support, you can choose to create transformation rules for all or just a few of a website's pages. The Cisco CTE 1400 is an appliance that handles requests for web pages from wireless devices and interprets the transformation rules to convert HTML/XML pages into wireless-compatible formats. The CTE handles web pages as noted in Table 1-1.
Table 1-1 How the Cisco CTE 1400 Handles Web Pages
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1 WML = Wireless Markup Language 2 HDML = Handheld Device Markup Language |
Design Studio simplifies the task of transforming web page content as follows:
CTE XHTML extensions also enable you to specify content transformations in your source HTML files. For more information, see the "Specifying Transformation Rules in HTML Files" section.
Design Studio also enables you to edit device definitions, which determine how the CTE transcodes a site for a particular device. For example, the CTE uses device specifications to determine whether to use cHTML or WML for a device and how to handle the images it sends to a device. You can use Design Studio to tune those specifications, such as to define different display characteristics for various WAP phones. You can also use Design Studio to create and import device definitions. For more information, see the "Configuring Device Definitions" section.
The Cisco CTE 1400 appliance uses rules uploaded from Design Studio to fulfill web page requests from wireless devices. Figure 1-1 shows the path for a wireless user request for a web page.
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Note The numbers in Figure 1-1 refer to the following process. |
The path the wireless user request takes is as follows:
1. A wireless user requests a URL. A wireless carrier transmits the request to a communications tower, through the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) carrier gateway, and to the Internet.
2. The server load balancer that receives the request evaluates the request header. The server load balancer directs HTML/XML requests to the web server farm and directs requests from wireless devices to the CTE.
3. The CTE terminates the request and then, acting as a proxy, sends a request to the server load balancer for the HTML/XML page.
4. When the CTE receives the page, it uses the rules in the configuration file to transform the content.
5. The CTE sends the transformed page to the server load balancer for forwarding to the wireless device.
The Cisco CTE 1400 and Design Studio support the formats most commonly used for websites and wireless devices.
Website content in the following formats is supported:
The CTE and Design Studio support web pages that use any standard encoding; they transcode web pages to the formats required by all supported wireless devices: UTF-8, 7-bit ASCII, and Shift_JIS encoding.
Wireless device microbrowsers do not support all content types. Thus, the Cisco CTE 1400 does not transform the following:
The Cisco CTE 1400 passes that content to a wireless device as is.
Table 1-2 lists the destination devices supported by the Cisco CTE 1400.
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1 cHTML = Compact HTML 2 WML = Wireless Markup Language |
Design Studio enables you to create transformations for the devices listed in Table 1-2. The base model of the Cisco CTE 1400 supports the IP phone and VoiceXML protocols, enabling multiple, simultaneous transformations from IP phone or VoiceXML users. In addition, the base model of the CTE supports one connection at a time for each of the other supported protocols. This feature enables you to test transformations on any CTE, even if you have not paid for support of a particular protocol. To add support for additional protocols, you must purchase license keys. For more information, refer to the Release Notes for Cisco CTE 1400 and Design Studio.
Many wireless devices are constrained by display size, navigation, and download time, as described in the following sections. Consider these factors as you choose content for wireless delivery. For information on issues specific to individual devices, refer to the Release Notes for Cisco CTE 1400 and Design Studio.
Web pages are typically optimized for a 800 x 600 screen resolution; they display reasonably at a 640 x 480 resolution. While some wireless devices have a 640 x 320 screen resolution, some devices have a much more limited display size. The minimum display size is approximately 5 lines of 30 characters each.
The amount of web content you select for display on a wireless device impacts the usability of the content.
A well-designed website uses few clicks to access important content. That same design may not work well on some wireless devices; two or three clicks might be inconvenient to a cell phone user.
When the page to be served to a wireless device exceeds the amount of text that can display on the device screen, the Cisco CTE 1400 breaks up the page into chunks, serves the first chunk, waits for a request to serve the next chunk, serves the second chunk, and so on.
Large amounts of text take longer to download and require the wireless user to issue requests for the next "page" of content. Depending on the device, the user may request the continuation of a page by spinning a trackwheel, pressing a button, or tapping a More button.
Suppose your company wants to provide wireless access to technical support Case Query web pages. You might create rules in Design Studio that transform the pages as follows:
Figure 1-2 shows a sample Case Query web page and the first page of transformed content as displayed on a RIM handheld device.
Posted: Mon Aug 18 17:16:20 PDT 2003
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