Question

I have been reading about the responsive web pattern and I have successfully implemented it on a test page. However I see the limitations of that the layout is limited by the order/sequence of the HTML tags. You can set the display:none property on a lot of content etc but that is not nice.

So is there a way on the server side to distinguish between what the HTML response are going to include based on what kind of device is used by the user? I am mainly interested in Scala (Lift) and Java EE solutions.

Answer 1

Using Lift you can identify the userAgent and if it is mobile, you can show different html than if the user is using a desktop browser.

There are a few ways to accomplish this, one is from the Sitemap, or another is from each snippet.

The mailing list is a good place to ask the specifics of each method.

Update

This is an example using Sitemap from Lift

def sitemap = SiteMap(
  Menu.i("Home") / "index" >> pickTemplate(),
  Menu.i("First") / "first" 
)

//Show mobile or regular page
def pickTemplate() ={
  //If the browser is Chrome, pick this template
  if(S.request.map(_.isChrome) openOr true  ){
    Template( ()=>Templates("chrome" :: Nil) openOr (NodeSeq.Empty))
  } else{
    Template( ()=>Templates("other" :: Nil) openOr (NodeSeq.Empty))
  }
}