Rhodes 3.0 Released! – Windows Phone 7, NFC, and RhoStudio with most advanced mobile debugger
We are very excited to announce the release of Rhodes 3.0. Rhodes 3.0 includes support for Windows Phone 7, which, as most of you know is a completely different operating system than Windows Mobile. Rhodes is the first smartphone framework to support Windows Phone 7. Silverlight is still the “official” way to write Windows Phone 7 apps. But Microsoft has made it clear that the future direction on all platforms is HTML5. Rhodes provides a way to write NATIVE Windows Phone 7 using HTML5 for interfaces (Views in the Rhodes Model-View-Controller pattern) today. Thus Rhodes is a solid strategic future-proof way to write native WP7 apps, whether or not you care as a developer about the ability to simultaneously generate iPhone and Android apps.
As blogged about recently, Rhodes 3.0 also supports Near Field Communications, which is about to explode on Android and other platforms. NFC allows easy device to device communication. More importantly it allows easy and reliable smartphone-based purchasing of products in a way that hasn’t yet been possible with mere device-level barcoding. Once NFC tags are embedded in most everyday objects the wideranging impact of NFC in smartphones will go even further as NFC in smartphones becomes the primary way that people manage, inquire about and manage objects in the world around them. The NFC revolution is beginning now and Rhodes is the only smartphone framework to support it.
RhoStudio is the Integrated Development Environment for Rhodes. It allows app generation, editing, and native device builds for all smartphone operating systems and even integrated debugging. For the first time ever on mobile devices developers can change their code on the fly and the app will be changed without requiring a full rebuild. Mobile developers tell us time and again that their biggest painpoint in development is the cycle time from identifying a bug, changing the code and rerunning the app. The Rhodes debugger takes that iteration timeframe to be almost instantaneous. This has been commonplace in desktop development since the days of Visual Basic. But instant development cycletime is a first for mobile development.
Finally RhoStudio and Rhodes 3.0 include the new RhoSimulator component. RhoSimulator allows device independent emulation without installing any underlying operating system SDK (such as iOS and Android). Rhodes itself is installable in one-click with Instant Rhodes. But the Android SDK is absurdly cumbersome to install. And BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and Windows Phone 7 SDKs are even worse. RhoSimulator eliminates the need to install those SDKs to test your apps running locally on your machine.
