The Rhomobile family
Rhomobile Inc. is a computer software company that provides leading products for building the new generation of mobile applications. It offers an open-source Ruby-based mobile development framework for business mobility solutions through its four major products Rhodes, RhoSync, Rhohub, and RhoGallery.
Rhodes
Rhodes is an open source framework by Rhomobile. It develops native applications for almost all smart phones. The applications built through Rhodes are pure native applications and use device capabilities such as GPS, PIM contacts and calendar, camera, native mapping, push, barcode, signature capture, and Bluetooth.
Rhodes accelerates the development of mobile applications without compromising on its portability. This framework is similar to the popular Rails framework. It is based on Model view Controller and has inbuilt Object Relational Manager (ORM) called Rhom that is similar to active Record in Rails. Most user interface customization can be done in HTML templates (ERB, eruby files). A single set of source written with Rhodes can be compiled to run across all of the supported smart phones. This means that we will have the same code base for all your devices.
RhoSync
RhoSync is a standalone mobile sync server that keeps enterprise application data up to date and available on users’ smart phones. Enterprise apps require local synchronized data to be used most of the time. The information is stored locally on a users’ device and is available to them even in offline mode. It is very easy to write a source adapter as RhoSync generates most of the code while creating the source adapter. The source adapter can also be used to Create, Read, Update, and Delete (CRUD) operations on a model.
Rhosync uses Redis, which is a NoSql Key Value store for data caching. This makes Rhosync more scalable. RhoSync performs its push-based sync using the native smartphone push SDKs. It uses new advanced BlackBerry Enterprise Server and iPhone 3.0 SDKs for Push. It uses BES Push and iPhone Push for synchronization, allowing real-time updates of backend application information.
RhoHub
RhoHub is a hosted development environment for Rhodes and Rhosync. The RhoSync application will be deployed on the famous Ruby cloud Heroku with the interface of RhoHub. RhoHub enables git-powered source control and collaboration with your team. It allows us to directly build an application for different smart phones without installing SDKs.
It makes the process of the build very smooth since we don’t have to install any development toolkits. It is only a one click process that automatically creates a build for most of the smart phones.
Rhohub provides us with the following functionalities:
- Creating a build for a Rhodes application
- Deploying the Rhosync application to the cloud
- Providing version control with git
- Managing collaborators
RhoGallery
RhoGallery provides a hosted mobile app management solution. It allows administrators to manage the set of apps exposed to their users. It also makes it easy for them to get mobile apps onto their devices. It enables users to launch all of their important enterprise apps from a single place. RhoGallery consists of a management console for “app galleries” on RhoHub, as well as a RhoGallery App that users load onto their devices. Even for an individual developer with one or a few apps, RhoGallery makes it easy to expose those apps to their users. RhoGallery handles inviting the users and determining the appropriate downloads to provide to them.
RhoGallery provides the following functionalities:
- Administrator management of exposed apps to end users
- Central user launching of exposed apps
- Automatic provisioning of appropriate apps for end users
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.
- 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.