Mobile developing on Rhodes
We had a sort of big week at Innku because our first mobile app was accepted in the Apple app store. It was a different experience deploying a compiled product and waiting for a response from Apple to actually see it out there in the wild.
We used rhodes 2.0 for developing the app, Rhodes is a rails inspired ruby framework designed to build one app for all the popular mobile platforms.
The plus sides of using this framework is that we didn’t need to change a whole lot of what we actually do in the web, it is just applying our ruby, html and css knowledge to building a mobile app. Also we have access to native device functionality like GPS or Camera wich is really nice. And it is definitely worth mentioning again that you can use ruby! the app code is really well organized, looks really good and it is amazingly easy to maintain.
The down side of using rhodes is that the finished product is a little slower than your standard app (Tested on Iphone 3g, not 3gs or 4). Also the documentation at this point isn’t really awesome, so you have to deal with a couple of issues on your way to launching your product.
Also it’s worth mentioning that if you are a rails developer madly in love with the framework, when developing with rhodes keep in mind that it is NOT rails. It has a lot of similar features but quite a bunch of differences, this might save you some time looking for stuff that just isn’t there.
I encourage you to try the framework out, the Rhomobile guys are quite active and i’m sure they’ll give you a hand to kick start your development if you need to. Also if you are are looking for an app to get the feeling of what rhodes might look like, you can check out our code at github it is the actual app that got into the app store so it might help you out.
