RhoHub: world’s first “mobile development as a service”
“Development as a service” is the newest buzzword in the cloud computing arena. Services such as Heroku and force.com have started to pioneer a new model of doing most of your development work out in the cloud with only a browser used on your local device. This is an exciting development in general. But no subdomain of app development is more in need of development as a service than mobile. Mobile apps typically require a complicated set of SDKs to be installed and require a specific type of computer operating system to run on (LInux users are often left in the cold here). At Rhomobile, we are in the process of launching the first “mobile development as a service”: RhoHub.
Some background: with Rhodes, we believe that we have provided the mobile app development industry with the ability to create native mobile apps that run across all smartphone operating systems for the first time ever. And beyond the portability benefits we’ve made it unprecedentedly easy to build apps even for a single smartphone device by letting people create native smartphone apps with the power and productivity of HTML templates (typically resulting in apps that are five times smaller in code size).
All that said, there are still ways that we can make development even easier by providing a web-based service for both Rhodes development and hosting of Rhodes apps. Although we provide nice high level rake scripts that let developers do builds for all smartphone operating systems from a single command, they still have to have the appropriate computer operating system to do the build (Macs for iPhone, Windows for other builds) and have to have the underlying SDKs (e.g. iPhone, BlackBerry, etc.) installed. Also if a developer wants to build and host an app that works with synchronized data they will typically need to set up a copy of a RhoSync server.
RhoHub allows developers to generate their client and server app code (HTML templates for the Rhodes client, source adapters for the RhoSync server) for each object of interest. They can then edit their code (HTML templates for Rhodes or Ruby code for RhoSync source adapters) online right from the RhoHub website. When the app is complete developers can then build an executable for Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, Android, iPhone or Symbian. To facilitate rapid development, RhoHub also introduces a Win32 build. Developers can build for Win32 and quickly download it to their local machine for testing (we will provide a Mac OSX Rhodes build later).
Once the app is complete, RhoHub also offers a “provisioning service”. Developers can expose a single URL to their users, e.g. “http://mobile.mycompany.com”. Users access that URL from their mobile web browsers and the RhoHub provisioning service will offer up the appropriate downloadable executable for the detected mobile device (a Windows Mobile .CAB file for a user accessing the URL via Pocket IE via their Blackjack II, a BlackBerry .COD file for a user hitting the site with their BlackBerry Bold). Developers also can easily deploy their RhoSync source adapters to the RhoHub-hosted RhoSync server, eliminating the need to host their own RhoSync server.
RhoHub will go to “public beta” next month at InterOp. Public beta means that it can be used to develop Rhodes-based apps. But it won’t be allowed to be used for production use by end users until RhoHub exits its beta phase and releases. We expect that to be some time in early July, but we’re looking for feedback from our early beta customers on this.
