Attention, Programmers: Want to Make Wrong Planet Mobile?

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Disclaimer: This proposal is not officially sponsored by Wrong Planet or Alex Plank.

See Mobile Version of Wrong Planet Forums.
GitHub: https://github.com/NeantHumain/MoForum

I am proposing that we the members of these forums take the initiative in making this site more accessible from mobile devices; and in the Computers, Math, Science, and Technology forum, I suspect at least some of us have the skills to accomplish this. I would like to propose we develop a free, open-source web application to wrap around the forums and give a mobile-friendly view, using HTML5 instead of device-specific apps. Basically, the application would act as a proxy between the mobile user agent and the forums, transforming the site's HTML into more mobile-friendly HTML. For now at least, I wouldn't want to pay to host this, so I'd leave it to the end users to host this for themselves, and this would be better for security since no central intermediary would be handling their log-in credentials, but this would obviously not be very user friendly. A constraint is we obviously cannot reach the database phpBB uses or add a mod or theme to these forums ourselves since we don't run them; as far as I know, phpBB doesn't expose an API or web services of any kind, so we'd rely on screen scraping.

Architecture: I am proposing we use Scala running on top of the Java virtual machine, compatible with a fully open-source stack: GNU/Linux, the OpenJDK, and then Apache Tomcat or GlassFish Server for the Java servlet container/JEE application server. This means people could run this on GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, etc. without issues. We would use git for versioning and team collaboration.

We would have two tiers to the application: a RESTful API and then an HTML5 front-end. The RESTful API hides the ugliness of scraping the forums' HTML for the data we'd want to transform into mobile-friendly HTML by emitting a JSON payload. The HTML5 front-end takes the JSON and turns it into HTML5. Actually, the RESTful API in turn could be divided into two parts: a site-specific adapter that transforms the HTML into JSON (swappable for different forum software and sites) and then the plumbing for the web service itself.

Is anyone interested in contributing? For me, this would be a part-time, ad hoc activity, but I would be leading the effort with a professional software-engineering background. I would say this would be a good learning experience and, if we actually get this into a semi-usable state, would be something you could add to your résumé or college application. Besides programmers, people with a less technical background may also be able to make a contribution: user-interface design for the mobile front-end, QA/beta testing, and documentation (technical writing). I personally would be willing to act as a professional reference for aspies from this site who make significant contributions; this could help make aspies more employable.

Moving to forum software from this century would accomplish the goal while also improving the experience for non-mobile users.

However as of 2 years ago or so I understand the owner's position on this was that aspies can't handle change, so he won't ever change the forum software.

I wonder how many years he is going to hold onto this position.

I'm all for making things are user friendly as possible. Not a programmer but I program every aspect of my life so it can run as smothly as possible. I thrive on apps.

There is now a repository on GitHub:
https://github.com/NeantHumain/MoForum

Good luck in your endeavor, but you realize phpBB offers a mobile interface, it may just be available in a newer release of phpBB than Alex is using?

I know nothing about programming, but I'd really love WP mobile or an WP app since I use an iPad, and sometimes get on WP using my dad's iPhone.

Hello, everyone!
I have been definitely browsing WP forum on my the simplest phone (not a smartphone at all) in the summer and fall of 2012. I decided lately to do this again and it appears I just could not. I can see title of a page and it is like downloading but the page always stays empty. I wonder if something wrong with the forum or with my phone (the same old phone). How do I know what's wrong?( I can use just Opera mini

I am running an Android platform phone and I use the Dolphin browser and have no problems other then the pita of zooming in and moving about as the site obviously isn't intended as being mobile compatible. I have had problems with Opera in last year or so and it is why I made the switch to Dolphin.

C# beats Java anyday (and it's almost as fast as C++), but Java still serves it's purpose well when teaching people to do object-oriented programming.