Comments on: Rhomobile chasing after mobile software dream

A start-up says it has found a way for mobile software developers to write applications once and have them run on five different modern smartphone operating systems.

[ajhoughton]

Cross-platform "solutions" like this have an annoying tendency to result in lowest common denominator engineering. Let's hope that isn't the case here. There are already enough awful apps on the iPhone without adding a whole new category.

[bottomline]

Commenting on the cross-platform portion of your post, I have to agree. It is an interesting proposition; the allure of cross platform write it once code and accompanying (allegedly) lower development cost vs custom written applications for a specific OS or device, being able to exploit its strengths.
We found debugging and updating one core code was advantageous, maintaining cross platform db data ok. But the overhead of running and added cost of licensing third party software did not pay off, especially with AppForge.
We have chosen to go the web connected mobile device route leaving behind the specific device/OS application. Some older (non-web connected) devices will not be supported, but we feel we are writing where the technology is going.
The decision is, depending on your app, why write OS, Device specific software?

[bottomline]

I hope they are better at it than AppForge was. Many developers like our company licensed AppForge's Crossfire product and were left with dead applications when they became insolvent.
If your mobile app involves database access and number crunching like ours does, more overhead on mobile processors is a deal killer.

[johnqh]

Cross-platform development tool never succeeds. Move on.

[forever4now]

PhoneGap is another interesting cross-platform framework, based on Javascript.

http://phonegap.com/

Not sure if one of these solutions will ultimately prevail or if they will all coexist for different purposes.

[BogusBasin]

Or you could just write for the iPhone. That gets you on the iPod Touch as well. Anything else is a waste of time.

[adam_blum]

Hmm... HTML for web development is crossplatform and Java is crossplatform and both are huge successes. PhoneGap is crossplatform for mobile devices as well, and looks OK to me (if you can live with their supported devices and lack of synced offline data). J2ME was crossplatform for featurephones (lowend consumer devices) and was good for that purpose. Rhodes is about rapid development of apps across all smartphones while still exposing unique device capabilities and providing access to synchronized data offline.

Regarding the last comment , for people that don't need apps to run on other devices besides the iPhone and like programming in Objective C verrus HTML, sure, they shouldn't learn Rhodes or PhoneGap.

Cheers,

Adam

[gelenas]

ruby compared to JavaScript allows to write significantly less coding lines, which makes easier to manage the code.