YAUAA: Yet Another User-Agent Analyzer

[Volkan Yazıcı <vo...@gmail.com>]

Hi all!

I tried to brought up the issue of unsustainability of maintaining a
repository-based User-Agent parser/analyzer subject in the mailing list
before[1], but got no response at all. At bol.com, we tried to do this
maintenance for DeviceMap and it inevitably failed. The reason is simple:
no development work-force can keep up with the speed of new User-Agent
agents introduced into the mobile device market.

Niels Basjes <https://github.com/nielsbasjes> (a bol.com architect) had
independently started developing a rule-based User-Agent analyzer around
2015: YAUAA (Yet Another User-Agent Analyzer)
<https://github.com/nielsbasjes/yauaa/>. Due to the semantic parsing of the
User-Agent string rather than blindly trying to match it against a
repository of User-Agents as in DeviceMap, YAUAA performs slightly slower
than DeviceMap. But given the fact that it is still at a couple of
milliseconds margin, we saw no need for increasing the code complexity for
diminishing returns. According to our observations, YAUAA is superior in
terms of accuracy compared to DeviceMap, thanks to the semantic parser.

Since DeviceMap is going to be moved to attic and there is still an ongoing
demand in the F/OSS market towards User-Agent analyzers, my two cents for
the next generations is to give YAUAA a look.

Cheers!

[1]
http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/devicemap-dev/201505.mbox/browser