compare phonegap to Rhodes - Rhomobile

[wannaphonegap]

Question1: Is there a matrix or roadmap to compare the differences
between phonegap and Rhodes - Rhomobile?
in particular for each phone OS what API is available and what's not.

Question 2: since, Apple now approves of phonegap. I believe phonegap
app will not be rejected by Apple right? how about other App Store
like Blackberry App World, Symbian Horizon, Windows Market Place,
Android App Store, Palm App Catalog, and Nokia Ovi store? any issue
anyone experience with any of these platform or any of the app store?

thank you,

[Vidal Graupera]

I am the co-author of an upcoming Apress book "Pro Smartphone Cross-
Platform Development: iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Mobile and Android
Development and Distribution" http://www.apress.com/book/view/9781430228684
which covers both Rhodes and PhoneGap. I have a lot of experience with
rhodes on several commercial projects, and I have been recently
learning phonegap. Both platforms allow you to write mobile apps for a
variety of platforms.

Here is how I see some of the key differences.

rhodes is a framework with emphasis on creating mobile enterprise
applications. with rhodes you are typically creating a new mobile
client application using the rhodes framework that connects to a
backend web application. rhodes offers (but doesn’t require) sync
(using rhosync server), mobile ruby, an mvc framework and hosted
development (rhohub). in rhodes you program in html, css, javascript
and ruby. if you wish to sync with rhosync, you write source adapters
in ruby.

phonegap’s emphasis is more horizontal and is about taking mobile web
apps and bringing the full features of html5 and device capabilities
to them. in phonegap, you program in html5, css and javascript.
phonegaps apis are javascript extensions. phonegap does not require
you to organize you application in any particular way.

the scope of rhomobile is much broader in the availability of the
rhosync server, the full MVC framework and the hosted development
service. phonegap on the other hand is less ambitious, more simple,
and lightweight. phonegap is device side only. the code bases between
rhodes/rhosync and phonegap differ by an order of magnitude or more.

rhodes and rhosync are commercially supported open source products
licensed under GPL. unless you open source your app you need to pay a
license fee to rhomobile. phonegap is free to use under MIT license so
you don't pay anything.

Vidal Graupera

[filmaj]

Thanks for the good summary of differences between Rhodes and
PhoneGap, Vidal.

As for your question 2, there are PhoneGap applications out on the
Android Market, the BlackBerry App World and the Nokia Ovi store.
Check out an app named 'TckTckTck' on the App World and Ovi store to
see an example of a cross-platform application Nitobi developed using
PhoneGap. In my experience, the Apple App Store is the most strict
with respect to approving applications.