Latest News from Adam Blum

Building Smartphone Apps

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 09:00:00 EDT

Smartphone apps are the most exciting trend in computing since the advent of web apps. How do you as a developer take advantage of this? More generally, how do you do that and get maximum reach for your app across the diversity of smartphones out there. If you’re writing a consumer app you can get away with just targeting the iPhone (albeit missing some market opportunity). If you’re writing a business app you need to be able to reach all the users in the enterprise. There just are no homogeneous mobile device environments in any place but the smallest mom and pop shops now.

Building iPhone Apps for Business

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 20:41:00 EDT

Friday I’m speaking at the Mobile 2.0 conference in Mountain View. The topic is “iPhone for Business”, which, if I took the topic literally, raises many issues about distribution and maintenance of smartphones in the enterprise. But I’m really just going to focus on the narrower issue of “iPhone apps for business”: how do you [...]

Utilizing Web Development Skills to Build Native Smartphone Apps

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 18:40:00 EDT

Yesterday RIM announced their Widget SDK. We’re excited about about this at Rhomobile because it is further validation of the strategy to utilize developer’s web skills to build great native apps. We often find ourselves having to explain “yes - it does let you write your interface in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. No - it’s [...]

The First Mobile Ruby

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 21:53:00 EDT

Our open source framework Rhodes contains the first implementation of Ruby for every major smartphone operating system: iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and Symbian. The primary benefits of the Rhodes framework are: the productivity and portability enabled by writing interfaces in HTML once (and compiling to native smartphone apps), access to device capabilities from a [...]

The Enterprise Smartphone Server

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 14:20:00 EDT

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, [...]

Use Web Dev Skills to Build NATIVE Smartphone Apps

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 23:07:00 EDT

I’ve been speaking at a lot of Ruby conferences over the past few months (almost every one). The attendees of these conferences are almost all web developers. They see that the big growth opportunity in software today is writing native smartphone apps (not mobile web apps, a category that the App Store has basically killed [...]

App Stores for All Major Smartphones Now Live!

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 13:53:00 EDT

Yesterday Microsoft announced that the Windows Marketplace for Mobile is accepting applications. This is a great opportunity for mobile developers. Combined with BlackBerry AppWorld, Android Market and Nokia Ovi Store there are now marketplaces available to facilitate distribution to users of every major smartphone. This is a great opportunity for developers. There is now a [...]

Simplified Licensing for Rhodes Announced

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 19:43:00 EDT

Today we announced simpler commercial license terms for our Rhodes and RhoSync products. Why did we change it? The previous license was fairly standard for embedded technology licensing: 5 percent of whatever you sell. Just a few years ago, the presence of an open source Gnu Public License alongside a commercial percentage-based license would have [...]

App Store Rules

Fri, 29 May 2009 21:35:00 EDT

The iPhone and the Apple App Store have been THE critical agents in changing the mobile consumer’s attitude with regard to mobile applications. Specifically they have converted virtually all smartphone users (beyond just the iPhone) to wanting and expecting to use native apps on their mobile devices. This is a huge sea change in behavior, [...]

EuRuKo and Device Capabilities

Mon, 11 May 2009 11:24:00 EDT

Yesterday I had the pleasure of speaking at the superb European Ruby Conference in Barcelona. It was fascinating seeing the enthusiasm of the audience for Ruby and the technologies presented. I also got to talk to several attendees about their own Ruby efforts. The most interesting chats that I had were reminders of how device [...]

UDDI as an Extended Web Services Registry

Fri, 04 Jun 2004 00:00:00 EDT

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.

Beyond Point to Point

Mon, 05 Apr 2004 00:00:00 EDT

Web services have emerged as an excellent method of integrating pairs of applications. Free and cheap Web services development tools from many different vendors make it easy to expose one application's capabilities to other applications that wish to invoke them.