Adam Blum

Rhomobile has always been focused on providing a modern open and standards-based way to mobilize enterprise apps. The first product we offered for that was Rhodes, an open source framework which makes it easy to build native smartphone apps using your web skills. But we also offered RhoSync, a modern mobile sync server that synchronizes data from backend applications down to the Rhodes apps on devices. We were proud that we made mobile data synchronization much easier, faster and more scalable than any of the other aging MEAP platforms that offer synchronization today. What we learned from customers and systems integrators using RhoSync was that the biggest value of RhoSync wasn’t that it enabled synchronized offline data, it was that it made it much easier to integrate with enterprise applications. By using RhoSync and writing small “source adapter” classes that ... (more)

Rhodes approach of NATIVE smartphone apps written with web standards validated

Recently Nitobi (the company behind PhoneGap) announced that they had been acquired.    Congratulations to Andre Charland, Brian Leroux, and the rest of the PhoneGap team.   We have always said that if you don’t need the data synchronization, Model View Controller pattern, industrial capabilities such as realtime barcode and NFC, and broadest device support that Rhodes offers – PhoneGap is a great option (effectively identical to Rhodes).   Both Rhodes and PhoneGap support writing great user interfaces using HTML (for NATIVE apps not web apps), especially combined with HTML5 styl... (more)

“hybrid applications” and Rhodes

As most of you know Rhodes was created to enable building native smartphone applications using web development skills: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Ruby and the general modern Model View Controller pattern.   We often get the question “oh, so you build hybrid apps“.   While frameworks that you let write HTML and still end up with a native app sound like they might be “hybrid” (of native and web), that isn’t the original meaning of the term “hybrid app”. So What Is A Hybrid App Anyway? In fact the term hybrid application refers to creating a native app shell or stub on the device,  fr... (more)

UDDI as an Extended Web Services Registry

As enterprises build a critical mass of Web services, they need some way of keeping track of those services. UDDI is an ideal store for such information. Using UDDI's built-in abstractions of business services, binding templates, and tModels referring to interface specifications, UDDI can be used to manage all of the addresses and protocols and formats of those services. This information can be used for several purposes, including providing location independence and identification of common supported interfaces among those services. But the amount of information tracked on each W... (more)

The Enterprise Smartphone Server

Rhodes is a great option for allowing developers to write their smartphone apps one time and have them run natively on all devices. After being out for a while several competitors emerged and now we have a product category known as the “smartphone app framework”, with several participants.   We believe that our first mobile Ruby, our fullfledged MVC framework, our hosted development site RhoHub and, most importantly, support for synchronized data, are longterm differentiators.  But in such as a nascent area its better to have some other players out there helping us educate the ma... (more)