The meteoric growth in smartphones device volume and diversity is one
of the few bright spots in the technology industry recently. But
developers trying to build mobile apps are stymied by the extreme
difficulty of writing mobile apps for multiple device operating
systems especially when there is no clear winner and diversity is just
increasing. Rhodes solves this dilemma for mobile developers by
letting them write once for all leading smartphones. And do it much
more productively by writing most of the interface in Ruby and HTML
rather than Java, Objective-C, or C++.
Our Ruby-based mobile application framework, Rhodes, ships with
several sample applications for sales (SugarCRM), field service
(Siebel OnDemand) and issue tracking (Lighthouse). However, we want to
see more samples that demonstrate the power of the framework, and the
ease with which robust mobile enterprise applications can be built.
Our developer community is generally working on proprietary
applications under our commercial license. To spur more examples
available as open source, we are holding an application development
contest. First prize of $10,000 will be awarded to the individual or
company building the best mobile application with Rhodes.
Rules and steps for application submission are available at
http://rhomobile.com/contest. Applications must be submitted to
Rhomobile by April 30, 2009. Prizes will be awarded on May 15, 2009.