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The following sections provide an overview of the Design Studio application and the Cisco Content Transformation Engine (CTE) 1400 Series:
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Note Throughout this publication, the Cisco CTE 1400 Series is referred to as the CTE. |
The CTE 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, microbrowsers 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 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 devices you want to support, you can choose to create transformation rules for all or just a few of a website's pages. The CTE is an appliance that handles requests for web pages from devices and interprets the transformation rules to convert HTML/XML pages into device-compatible formats. The CTE handles web pages as noted in Table 1-1.
Table 1-1 How the CTE Handles Web Pages
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 device. For example, the CTE uses device specifications to determine how to handle the images it sends to a device. You can use Design Studio to tune those specifications and to create and import device definitions. For more information, see the "Configuring Device Definitions" section.
The CTE appliance uses rules uploaded from Design Studio to fulfill web page requests from devices. Figure 1-1 shows the path for a user request for a web page.
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Note The numbers in Figure 1-1 refer to the following process. |
The path a web page request takes is as follows:
1. A 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 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 device.
The CTE 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 supported devices: UTF-8, 7-bit ASCII, and Shift_JIS encoding.
Microbrowsers do not support all content types. Thus, the CTE does not transform the following:
The CTE passes that content to a device as is.
Table 1-2 lists the destination devices supported by the CTE.
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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 CTE supports the IP phone protocol, enabling multiple, simultaneous transformations from IP phone 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.
Most microbrowsers are constrained by display size, navigation, and download time, as described in the following sections. Consider these factors as you choose content for delivery to devices. For information on issues specific to individual devices, refer to the Release Notes.
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. IP phones have a bitmap display that ranges from 2 lines of 24 characters each to 133 x 65 pixels.
The amount of web content that you select for display on a 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 devices; two or three clicks might be inconvenient to a microbrowser user.
When the page to be served to a device exceeds the amount of text that can display in the microbrowser, the CTE 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 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 key, or selecting a button.
For examples of website content that is transformed, use a device to access http://go.net6.com. This website is a portal to a variety of websites that provide information on such topics as news, stock quotes, weather, yellow pages, and traffic. Compare the web page from the originating website to the page delivered by go.net6.com to see how the content has been transformed for devices.
Posted: Mon Aug 18 16:28:36 PDT 2003
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