CSS/JavaScript web toolkits

There are now at least five major CSS/JavaScript web toolkits on the market, focused on building mobile web apps that look native on iPhone and Android. These include jQTouch, Sencha, JQuery Mobile, IUI, SproutCore/Strobe. Occasionally we have been getting questions about whether these toolkits are competitive with Rhodes. Actually they are only complementary to Rhodes. In fact, Rhodes encourages using such tools. We ship with an enhanced version of JQTouch to style the HTML and HTML5 that Rhodes utilizes for writing apps. And we have plenty of Rhodes developers using Sencha and IUI in their Rhodes apps as well.

Rhodes focuses on its differentiators as a full framework:
- the only Model View Controller framework for smartphones
- the only support for all devices
- the only Object Relational Manager
- the only app generator
- a robust device capabilities library
- the industry’s only smartphone-focused sync

The mobile web toolkits don’t do any of these things, or try to. But, since Rhodes uses HTML, CSS and JavaScript in its views, their presence is very helpful to developers building apps with Rhodes. And it lets us at Rho concentrate on the true IP of Rhodes and RhoSync, allowing the “mobile web toolkits” provide UI enhancements for us and our developers. That IP (see that list) is large and growing. And they are not things that are going to appear in web standards.

Of course the companies that should be really worried are those that have tried to create their own UI libraries as alternatives to HTML’s abstractions, generally in Javascript. These include Appcelerator and Ansca Corona. They are competing headon with the ways that JQTouch, Sencha, JQuery Mobile and Strobe are making HTML/CSS/JavaScript user interfaces better and more native. We are very happy that the Rhodes approach of HTML/CSS/JavaScript for views is able to leverage their tens of millions of development dollars versus duplicating on a proprietary (albeit JavaScript) basis.

So thanks to Strobe/Sproutcore, Sencha, JQTouch, JQueryMobile and IUI for creating great tools. We aren’t seeing many developers wanting to build mobile web apps nowadayy. But your libraries help Rhodes developers in writing what users do want: native apps with great HTML-based user interfaces.