Why Rhomobile is cutting edge

The following features give a cutting edge to Rhomobile in mobile application development:

  • Model View Controller: Most of the other frameworks available in the market are based on HTML and JavaScript. However, as Rhodes is a Ruby-based framework and its structure is similar to the popular framework Rails, it also supports Model View Controller, so code written with Rhodes is more structured and easy to understand.
  • Cross Platform Support for All Devices: Rhodes supports the following devices: Android, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, and iphone. The best thing is you have a single code base from which you can build applications for different smart phones. It does not work in a traditional way in that we have to write separate code for different types of phones.
  • Offline Capabilities using Rhosync: Rhomobile supports local synchronization of data. As we can synchronize the data using Rhosync it provides offline Capabilities. It can work even if you are offline.
  • Object Relational Manager: Rhodes provides an inbuilt Object Relational Manager called Rhom. It is similar to Active Record in Rails but with basic functionality only. It helps us to write queries without thinking about which database is being used by phone.
  • Rapid Development: One of the most interesting features of Rhodes is that it imposes some fairly serious constraints on how you structure the applications that help us for rapid development. Rhomobile products are properly structured and well organized, which enforce us to do rapid development. Rhodes is very comfortable, familiar, and massively productive.
  • Scalable Sync Server: The Sync Server uses a NoSql Database which makes it scalable. Specifically, it is the only sync server that has a built-in "no SQL" Redis key value store, making it more scalable than other sync servers which offer internal relational database servers for caching. RhoSync also performs its push-based sync using the native smart phone push SDKs, which no other sync server does.
  • Liberal use of code generation: Rhodes/RhoSync can write a lot of code for you. For example, when you need a class to represent a table in your database, you don't have to write most of the methods. Rhodes even offers an application generator that creates an initial app based on the structure of your models or business objects in your app. It's very similar to the scaffolding offered by most modern web frameworks with basic list/create/read/update/delete objects functionality. For each basic CRUD action, views in HTML are also offered. You'll find that you're writing only a fraction of code compared to other frameworks.
  • Metadata: Every enterprise application that is used to run a company's core business has a different schema for its business objects. For example, every application has a varying and customized structure that changes with time. It is not possible to install the client application again and again for a small change. The Metadata framework provides a way to handle the view from the Rhosync server. It also provides validation and a custom template. We will discuss this in detail in Chapter 8.
  • Hosted Development and Build: Rhomobile also provides a hosted management and Build through Rhohub. We can deploy a Rhosync app and build our Rhodes code for different phones with it.

Which products does Rhomobile support?

Rhomobile supports a variety of smart phone devices and tablets. Currently, Rhodes version 3 supports the following major platforms:

  • iPhone and iPad
  • Android
  • Blackberry
  • Windows Mobile including Windows mobile 7

Note

Note: Support for Symbian is no longer available from Rhodes version 2.2.

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