Rhomobile announced today the new version of its enterprise-focused smartphone app development framework: Rhodes 2.0. Developers can use the now-free Rhodes 2.0 to build native yet cross-platform apps for the iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry, Android, Windows Mobile and Symbian phones using HTML, CSS and Javascript.
Rhomobile CEO Adam Blum says it’s difficult for enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management vendors to provide one-size-fits-all mobile apps because the back-ends of these systems are almost always customized. “The apps in app stores are teasers,” says Blum. Instead of using hard-coded schemas, the new version of Rhodes solves this probling by using a metadata framework that supports applications with changing underlying schemas.
Other new features in 2.0 include native styling and MapConnect. Rhodes has always supported the iPhone’s native mapping, but some of its features, such as annotated pushpins and arbitrary zoom, aren’t available on other platforms. MapConnect makes this special functionality portable.
Starting with version 2.0, Rhodes is now free open-source software under the MIT license. Rhomobile used to charge a small fee for the framework. However, the company does sell enterprise licensing.
Rhodes competes with other open-source mobile app frameworks like PhoneGap and Titanium, but is the only one that includes an MVC framework.
Rhomobile’s main business model is its synchronization server RhoSync. The company also offers a web-based development environment called RhoHub.
