How to identify Web request from PDA/Desktop/Server?

Question

I would like to know if is possible to identify (with JAVA) the kind of computer used to make a request, for example: Server, desktop, PDA (tablet,cellphone,etc)?

Thank you!

Answer 1

Yes it is to a degree. You have to get the User-Agent string from the HTTP request. How to do that will depend on your Java and framework implementation but that's the direction you should take. You will have to examin the string for browser versions, mobile, etc...

Here is the request from my Mac:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_5) AppleWebKit/536.30.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0.5 Safari/536.30.1

And here from my Windows server:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/5.0)

And here from my iPhone:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 6_1_3 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0 Mobile/10B329 Safari/8536.25

Answer 2

Depends on what are you using to accept requests. For http requests, informations are in User agent section of request header.