developing smartphone apps using Rhomobile.

Question

I have been developing an Android application for about two months now, and the guy I'm writing it for wants me to use this instead of the android SDK so we can deploy the application for multiple smart phones: http://rhomobile.com/

he says you can write the application in one language and it can be deployed for most smart phones. Has anyone used this website to do something similar? Any advantages or disadvantages I should know about and tell him? Maybe someone could give me a better explanation on what this really does.

I'm current a one man army. He wants the application out for most smart phones but can afford to hire more developers.

Answer 1

Rhomobile will start up a small webserver on your phone and then show a webview that is directed to this webserver. You are able to write all the application logic in ruby in a way you would do it if you would write a web app that is deployed on a real web server. Rhomobile uses CSS etc. to have the app look look a little bit like a native app.

If you know Ruby you will get an App fast but it will look crappy and the user experience will be crappy too. A similar framework is appcelerator titanium they will let you write the app in Java Script and then compile it into a mix of javascript, webview and native components that run on an Iphone and on an Android phone and titanium has a much nicer user experience then rhomobile.

Visit their pages and test some of the apps that they are promoting as showcase for their frameworks.

Answer 2

As many developers writing apps in Objective C have learned using HTML for the view and styling with CSS styling libraries is a great way to create attractive native apps. Rhomobile's Rhodes uses this approach as well. We used to let people use whatever CSS they wanted and they could choose to use IUI, JQTouch, IWebKit, WebApp.net or any other library along with Rhodes. The best external apps all seemed to use JQTouch for styling and animated transitions.

Recently we decided to ship with our own fork of JQTouch (which we made work on Android) in order to make this even easier. The recent Rhodes master branch created apps with JQTouch builtin makes such attractive apps even easier to build, as the stylesheets are included with Rhodes scaffold-generated apps.