While the (bring your own device) phenomenon has been over-hyped by vendors and the trade media alike, its usability benefits for individuals has (if anything) been overshadowed by a glut of companies now lining up to proffer forth yet another generation of “write once — run anywhere” solutions.
Latest in line to produce a cross-platform development framework of this ilk is Motorola with its RhoMobile “true HTML5” approach. The suite combines three of the firm’s existing technologies to produce a means of synchronizing data and therefore providing operational applications that function in either a connected or disconnected environment.
Combining the features of RhoElements, RhoConnect, and RhoStudio into one solution, RhoMobile Suite is positioned as means of enabling developers to build secure enterprise-grade business applications with a consumer-style look and feel across “virtually any OS, device and screen size,” says the company.
Motorola further states that RhoMobile applications are able to support enterprise-class mobile operating systems including Windows Mobile, Windows CE, and Blackberry OS. Consumer grade operating systems including Android, Apple iOS, Symbian, and Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 are also supported. This, in theory, allows customers and independent software vendors to go to market at the same time with multiple platforms instead of staggering releases for different applications.
RhoElements enables both hybrid (connected) as well as native (disconnected) HTML5 applications so a developer can build once and run on multiple operating systems and devices while connected or disconnected. Since RhoElements is based on HTML and HTML5, developers are provided with a format to allow applications to look and feel the way the developers/designers prefer.
“RhoConnect is the first of a new category of mobile application integration servers that handles the details of connecting to enterprise backend applications by integrating into multiple systems and managing and determining the amount of data synchronization required. RhoConnect allows developers to connect their data source — using any framework — to their device, anywhere, anytime. The server is efficiently designed for performance, scale and evolving technologies,” said the company.
Joining this group of technologies is RhoStudio, an Eclipse plug-in designed to allow developers to use a single computer to quickly develop off-platform RhoElements applications and RhoConnect adapters for delivering a complete RhoMobile Suite solution.
