rhomobile with Rhodes

[Tim Golden]

Has anyone used any of the products from rhomobile to develop multi-
platform mobile apps?

I'd like to look into building cross platform mobile apps

[Ted Roche]

Hey, Tim:

I don't have a lot of practical experience in building native mobile
apps. I've always targeted mobile platforms with an HTML front end and
a centralized Ruby or PHP backend. However, I saw a presentation at
jQueryCon 2008 and the developers made a real case that developing
native applications for the mobile platforms was a losing game - each
is proprietary, different and single-sourced from one vendor who might
make drastic changes leaving you orphaned (anyone say 'Nokia?').
C-Sharp on one, Java on another, uck.

This fellow's argument was that Javascript was the answer, that it ran
on all platforms and could be built-once, deployed many times (where
have we heard that before?). I don't recall what his particular
solution was (I'll try to look that up, though it was 2 Internet
generations ago) , but you might want to look at something like
PhoneGap: (http://www.phonegap.com/) Open Sourced under MIT licensed
multiple platforms, etc. Ha. Whatdyaknow. Brian LeRoux was the speaker
I heard, and his company, Nitobi.com, seems to be the brains behind
PhoneGap. I'd check it out - the price is right!

Looking over the Rho product a little more, it looks like they don't
actually create native apps, but rather HTML/CSS/Javascript on the
mobile device, talking to hosted Ruby apps "in the cloud" and their
business model is charging for the hosting and the sync functions and
their pre-built server infrastructure. GitHub and Heroku and Ruby,
looks like they know all the right words. Interesting. They
specifically reference PhoneGap (lost the reference) with a comment
that PG is more appropriate for consumer-grade apps, implying Rho is
more enterprise-y. I tend to agree with that assessment, from a quick
skim: it looks like more tiers, more interfaces, more coding. So, if
you need the complexity, it might be a better choice. But it might be
overkill for a simple need.

So, what kind of any app are you looking at building?

--
Ted Roche
Ted Roche & Associates, LLC
http://www.tedroche.com

[Tim Golden - W]

Thanks ted! Always a great resource!

I have 5 apps in mind that I'd be happy to share about off line :) as I
wouldn't want anyone to steal my money-maker.... :)

Maybe a NHRUG topic for the March meeting??? Nick... Brian... anyone..??

Hey, Tim:

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[Jesse McCarthy]

I hadn't heard of PhoneGap before and I was curious where it fits into
the ecosystem with things like jQuery Mobile, and apparently the jQuery
Mobile project recommends PhoneGap, at least for deploying via app
stores:

> App-Capable: The usefulness of jQuery Mobile goes far beyond making
> impressive mobile web applications - you can also use it to build apps
> that can be purchased and deployed through an app store. We strongly
> recommend using PhoneGap as it gives you the full tools you need to
> deploy HTML/CSS/JavaScript applications to a mobile device.

http://jquerymobile.com/2010/10/jquery-mobile-alpha-1-released/

Jesse

[Nick Plante]

I haven't used Rhomobile but I've toyed around with PhoneGap and it's pretty swell (and very easy to try out). I pretty much just used it for "packaging" a mobile web app, though, as Jesse indicated. It also provides some javascript hooks in order to access native phone capabilities, but I never dug into that stuff. Personally I believe that if you need native phone feature access (camera, GPS, etc) you're probably still better off building a native app. If not, go jQuery mobile + PhoneGap. Depends on what you need.

Cheers,

..nap

[Tim Golden - W]

Thanks Nic... will poke around at PG..
Have you seen www.conduit.com if you have a website/RSS feeds this a neat
tool to turn it into a mobile app quickly