Mobile Phone Development | The Communication Blog

Friday, October 29, 2010

Mobile Phone Development

By Scott Adams

The pace at which technology moves is quite literally the speed of light. If you are not constantly connected you will not be able to keep up on everything that happens each day. The mobile market is definitely the fastest developing of all the technology verticals. Specifically app development is where all the buzz is occurring. With so many popular mobile platforms developers have started turning to the power of cross-platform mobile frameworks to support their projects. Every smart business is seizing the opportunity to reach consumers with smartphone apps, but app development is not always straight forward.

The firm leading the pack in development platforms for enterprise mobility is Rhomobile. Their Rhodes framework, which just released its version 2.2, will be a household name among all app developers in a very short order. This most recent upgrade now gives developers the ability to support Bluetooth, Calendar, and Android Cloud to Device Messaging for all major smartphones (iPhone, Windows Mobile, Android, BlackBerry, Symbian). Just as desktop software has been evolving for over thirty years, smartphone apps continue to become more demanding on resources and on programmers. Deployment on multiple platforms has posed significant challenges for many companies and developer groups, but cross-platform frameworks like Rhodes eliminate this problem altogether.

With the Rhodes framework, developers can write native applications for all leading smartphones, which are able to do things like access and create events in the native device calendar. For geolocation applications, for example, end users can add events, places or notifications direct to their device calendar. With the new Bluetooth support, developers can add another layer of connectivity to their Rhodes apps, providing a power efficient communications protocol to transfer data between other smartphones and hand-held devices.

Rhodes 2.2 features support for Android Cloud to Device Messaging - a continuing feature for Blackberry and iPhone but new to the Android OS. Rhodes lets developers write apps using HTML, Javascript and Ruby, and additionally version 2.2 leverages built in support for Android's cloud-based push. This makes it possible to for the server to send requests and update application and user data on the smartphone application. The best part is that requests can be kept current even when the application is not open, so the data is always updated.

With smartphones growing in popularity and sophistication the mobile revolution is here to stay. Right now mobile developers can take full advantage of a litany of native features such as GPS, audio and video, PIM contacts, accelerometer, native mapping, camera, and calendar. Other features that give Rhodes developers a near infinite variety of options are Bluetooth Capability, Calendar Support, Support for Android Cloud to Device Messaging, Model View Controller framework, Object Relational Manager (ORM), Support for Push Synchronized Data on all platforms, Hosted build and app provisioning, ability to work with synced local data for rapid access and ease of operation when disconnected or offline, barcode, signature capture and optimized native styling for all devices.

There has never been a better time to be a mobile phone developer and it just keeps getting easier. Rhodes is an open source project and is completely free to anyone who desires to use it. Developers only have a few quality options for cross-platform frameworks, and because of its tremendous ease and functionality app developers are adopting Rhodes in greater and greater numbers. With the ever expanding community the only thing you have to lose is not becoming a part of it.

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