Adam Blum the present CEO of Rhomobile has been CTO/VP of Engineering/co-founder of several successful startups in the mobile and web services spaces: Commerce One, Systinet, and Good. He is an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon and the author of several books on various computer science topics.
Founded by a team of Silicon Valley veterans, Rhomobile is a privately held company with backing from vSpring Capital and Alta Ventures
Appcelerator
AppMakr
PhoneGap
Rhomobile's open source mobile application framework Rhodes lets you quickly build native mobile applications for all smartphones: iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Symbian and Android. These are true native device applications (not mobile web apps) which work with synchronized local data and take advantage of device capabilities such as GPS, PIM contacts and camera. A separate open source server-based component, RhoSync, can be optionally used to facilitate automatic synchronization of backend enterprise app data to the mobile device.
To make development of applications with the Rhodes framework even easier, Rhomobile recently introduced RhoHub, the world's first Development as a Service for Mobile. RhoHub lets developers develop and build native smartphone apps online from the RhoHub website (no installation of development or build tools to their own laptops required). Once completed, these apps can be hosted at runtime from the RhoHub site. In its short availability RhoHub has built a community of thousands of developers.
Rhodes is free and open source framework (under MIT Licence) by Rhomobile.
It develops native applications for almost all smart phones, but you need to have the particular operating system for developing locally.
It is the only cross mobile framework based on Model
View Controller.
Rhodes provides an inbuilt Object Relational Manager called Rhom.
Rhom supports two models: 'Property bag' and 'Fixed Schema'
The database is SQLite on all platforms except BlackBerry, where it is HSQL
To develop for a particular platform you need to have it’s specific SDK
Rhosync uses Redis, which is a NoSql Key Value store for data caching.
Synchronization framework facilitates data synchronization between the Rhodes/RhoSync-Client and a third-party source (SOAP, REST, etc.)
Each source is synchronized by creating "source adapter" class, which would interact with your backend data source.
Source Adapter consist of:
Login
Query
Create
Update
Delete
Logoff
Sync
The RhoSync application will be deployed on the famous Ruby cloud Heroku with the interface of RhoHub.
It allows us to directly build an application for different smart phones without installing SDKs.
RhoHub also assist user by its online Editor.
RhoHub editor supports for e.g. editing Ruby/HTML/CSS/JavaScript files, viewing image files, uploading of local files into the editor, adding, removing, and renaming of files and directories
RhoGallery provides a hosted mobile app management solution.
It enables users to launch all of their important enterprise apps from a single place
RhoGallery consists of a management console for "app galleries" on RhoHub
RhoGallery makes it easy to expose those apps to their users
RhoGallery handles inviting the users and determining the appropriate downloads to provide to them.
DRAWBACKS
Although it supports most of the device capabilities of smartphone but not all of them.
The support for symbian based phones is limited for their commercial interest.
Rhomobile mainly targeted platforms are iPhone and Android.
You can write simple interface apps with rhodes but if you want to make more fancy look for your app you need to implement it with HTML5,CSS,JavaScript,JQuerryMobile.
When providing security to your database the All database modification operations can be slow, especially on big databases.
(Precaution)While using RhoHub you have to keep pull your changes to your local PC and keep backups of them.
If you've edited native controls of any application you cannot compile it on other platforms it will be confronted for that mobile OS.
It limits by phone storage, works fine with 100MB database but after that application becomes slow.
To develop an enterprise level app with full functionality the developer should know the following in depth
Ruby, Rails, HTML/HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, JSON, JQuerry, Redis, Rhom.
