Mobile World Congress: crossplatform diversity only accelerating – Rhodes 1.4 released!

There were many exciting announcements today at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona. The biggest ones all emphasize just how much crossplatform diversity is here to stay and the diversification is only accelerating.

The Wholesale Applications Community finally creates a viable app marketplace for phones beyond the iPhone. Yes, there were marketplaces for Android, Windows Mobile and Palm, but with far less traction. This new marketplace should gain critical mass quickly. More interesting is how to target an app for all of the phones available on that marketplace. Rhomobile’s Rhodes is the only framework that allows building native apps with synchronized data for all of those devices.

Microsoft finally shipped Windows 7 aka Windows Phone. With support for touchscreen usage through and through it looks to be a big winner. Developers will get the features of some “more modern” smartphones with Microsoft’s huge installed base of Windows Mobile apps. Using Rhodes will let developers write for Windows Phone and their apps will work on all other smartphones as well.

Also, smartphone installed base leader (by a wide margin) Nokia and Intel announced a new smartphone OS, Meego. Meego combines features of Moblin and Maemo to create yet another strong contender in the smartphone marketplace. So, as predicted on this blog many times, there are now seven major smartphone OSes. Rhodes supports five of them today, and the other two soon. Developers are flocking to smartphone app frameworks (a term we coined) to enable them to handle this dizzying diversity.

To address this today we announced Rhodes 1.4 stable production release. Among the many new Rhodes 1.4 features:

* support for a host of new Ruby gems in Rhodes: net/http(s), JSON, REXML (XML) , crypt, openssl, digest, lang, set, fcntl
* extension framework for adding third party extensions (gems) to Rhodes* API for returning screensize (write apps that handle the iPad gracefully!)
* native mapping for RIM BlackBerry (in addition to native mapping on iPhone)
* improved logging (from Ruby in Rhodes)
* support for the RIM BlackBerry 5.0 Java Development Environment
* a Mac OSX debugger (stepwise debugging in Ruby)
* improved spec running framework (do Test Driven Development on your smartphone! where else can you get that)

Support for net/http and net/https is being widely used to connect directly to backend sites. JSON and Rexml let you work with data on the device. The screensize API lets you conditionally handle different screensizes even better. Due to use of the browser component Rhodes excels at handling different screensizes. But having an explicit API makes it even better. The Mac OSX debugger for Rhodes allows you to debug your smartphone apps realtime.

In summary, Rhodes 1.4 provides a rich Ruby environment for native smartphone development. Write powerful apps once – compile to run everwhere. It offers a modern, productive development capabilities hitherto not available in mobile. Specifically interactive debugging, logging and spec-driven Test Driven Development is now possible in a framework which reaches all smartphones.

1 Comments | Posted by adam