Comments on: Which Mobile Platforms Should You Target? (Part 1)

By: Agile Ajax » Which Mobile Platform Should You Target - Other Points of View » Pathfinder Development

Mon, 06 Apr 2009 18:06:58 +0000

[...] two part series Which Mobile Platform Should You Target – on web apps and on native apps – generated a fair bit of feedback, especially from those targeting cross [...]

By: NYWebTeam

NYWebTeam — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 03:40:22 +0000

we are also using RhoMobile’s framework.

By: Agile Ajax » Which Mobile Platforms Should You Target? (Part 2) » Pathfinder Development

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 11:05:24 +0000

[...] the first installment, we covered the simple case, where your application is really a web app, not really using any [...]

By: joritter

joritter — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 14:15:37 +0000

Bernhard, your topic really sounds familiar! At least for the mobile enterprise application market the technology Mobile OSGi offers a proposition that seems to fit to your context. Refer to http://www.slideshare.net/j.ritter/mobile-osgi-for-enterprise-applications (specificall page 25 and 31). More on Mobile OSGi you find at http://mobileosgi.blogspot.com. What’s your take on that?

By: Adam Blum

Adam Blum — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 21:39:29 +0000

We actually talk about this in two different questions on our FAQ on our site (just for emphasisis . Rule 3.3.2 says that you cannot download interpreted code. It does not prohibit having an embedded interpreter. In fact there are hundreds of iPhone AppStore apps with embedded interpreters (Javascript interpreters, shell script interpreters, etc.). What you can’t do is download code to those interpreters. In fact, just to protect developers from themselves we disable several Ruby features (such as eval).

By: Giorgio Venturi

Giorgio Venturi — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 11:49:15 +0000

Thank you Bernhard. It’s a very good point: before building an app, do you really need an app? Or is it just about being “cool”? I hope it makes sense.

Thank you also for the article, though there is an alternative explanation to iPhone “supremacy”: the unlimited access to web – no pay per usage. I would be curious to see how that compares with countries where iPhone is sold with no unlimted access to the web (e.g. Italy).

By: Dietrich Kappe

Dietrich Kappe — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 15:12:16 +0000

@Adam

My apologies. I was looking specifically at the iPhone version. Given the iPhone’s strict prohibition against deploying interpreters in apps, I assumed your iPhone version was a Webkit wrapper of some sort that exposed native features into JavaScript. The language in your FAQ seemed to indicate that your “pages” looked like native iPhone UI.

Can you clarify?

By: Adam

Adam — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 11:21:14 +0000

Gentlemen,

Rhomobile is NOT a web-based solution at all. It is a framework that allows you to build a NATIVE application. From the front page of our website:

Rhomobile’s open source mobile application framework Rhodes lets you quickly build mobile interfaces to enterprise applications. These are true native device applications: They work against synced local data and take advantage of device capabilities such as GPS and PIM access.

By: Dietrich Kappe

Dietrich Kappe — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 21:47:01 +0000

@Andrew

We’ve looked at a number of solutions, including the one you mention. Clearly writing an app for a common platform is more cost effective than writing apps — even ones that share a business model and rules — for several platforms. That being said, rhomobile looks like a web-based solution (see the faq). There’s nothing wrong with that (see the blog post above and our solution TankEngine), but it isn’t always appropriate for all types of applications.

By: Andrew Herron

Andrew Herron — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 20:10:16 +0000

Have you checked out RhoMobile? Seems promising to be able to develop apps for all major platforms.

http://www.rhomobile.com/