Building Cross Platform Mobile (Smartphone) Apps With Ruby & Html – Presentation from RubyConfIndia2010
| Find below is the slidedeck on Building Cross Platform Mobile (Smartphone) Apps With Ruby & Html – An Introduction To Rhodes that we had presented at RubyConfIndia 2010.
We will share the Video Very soon … !!! Happy Coding with Rhodes from Rhomobile. Refer to http://wiki.rhomobile.com/ there is ton of documentation over there. Feel free to write us if you need any help. |
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Building Mobile (Smartphone) Apps with Ruby & HTML
There are quite a few Cross-Platform Smart phone development frameworks available today – to name a few Rhodes from Rhomobile, PhoneGap from Nitobi, Titanium from Appcelerator and a couple more.
We choose Rhodes for developing natively optimized cross-platform mobile apps for the following reasons:
- the only framework that supports all smartphones
- the only framework that is Model View Controller
- contains first mobile Ruby
- only framework that supports sync
- only framework with a hosted development environment
- When it comes to the development of the app, its more or less similar to developing a Ruby on Rails web applications. Rhodes borrows from Rails but not Rails.
- We can use all the familiar tools as is on the choice of development environments, it all works magically.
- And the best part is its Ruby, HTML and CSS. rhogen for App & Model Generators, Rhom for schema-less database handling, Rhosync for connecting with enterprise web services for offline use and Active Smartphone Push.
Rhodes supports five major smartphone operating systems: iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Symbian, and Android.
As of Rhodes 1.5 release, here is the device capabilities supported. Its Open Source and easily extensible for further customizations.
New lets explore how to get started…
Installing Rhodes
The Rhodes source code is available at http://github.com/rhomobile/rhodes
Needs ruby 1.8.6 or 1.8.7 version.
D:\BitlaSoft>ruby -v
ruby 1.8.6 / ruby 1.8.7
Install rhodes – as simple as any gem install.
D:\BitlaSoft>gem install rhodes
D:\BitlaSoft>gem list rhodes
rhodes(1.4.2)
Installing Device SDKs
Follow the instructions mentioned at the respective websites on how to install Device SDKs.
Install the SDK of the mobile device that you want to develop the applications on.
iPhone(Need Mac for testing on Simulator)
http://developer.apple.com/iphone/
Android
http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html
BlackBerry
https://www.blackberry.com/Downloads/entry.do?code=060AD92489947D410D897474079C1477
Setting up Rhodes
D:\BitlaSoft>rhodes-setup
Generate an AddressBook App and Launch in the Simulator
Generate an AddressBook App
D:\BitlaSoft>rhogenapp address_book
Generating with app generator:
←[32m [ADDED]←[0m address_book/rhoconfig.txt
←[32m [ADDED]←[0m address_book/build.yml
←[32m [ADDED]←[0m address_book/app/application.rb
←[32m [ADDED]←[0m address_book/app/index.erb
←[32m [ADDED]←[0m address_book/app/layout.erb
←[32m [ADDED]←[0m address_book/app/loading.html
←[32m [ADDED]←[0m address_book/Rakefile
←[32m [ADDED]←[0m address_book/app/helpers
←[32m [ADDED]←[0m address_book/icon
←[32m [ADDED]←[0m address_book/app/Settings
←[32m [ADDED]←[0m address_book/public
Generate Contact Model
D:\BitlaSoft\address_book>rhogenmodel Contact name,phone,email,company,address
Generating with model generator:
←[32m [ADDED]←[0m app/Contact/config.rb
←[32m [ADDED]←[0m app/Contact/index.erb
←[32m [ADDED]←[0m app/Contact/edit.erb
←[32m [ADDED]←[0m app/Contact/new.erb
←[32m [ADDED]←[0m app/Contact/show.erb
←[32m [ADDED]←[0m app/Contact/contact_controller.rb
←[32m [ADDED]←[0m app/Contact/contact.rb
←[32m [ADDED]←[0m app/Contact/contact_spec.rb
Set Start Page –rhoconfig.txt
# Startuppage for your application
start_path= ‘/app/Contact‘
# Path to the options page (in this case handled by javascript)
options_path= ‘/app/Settings’
# Location of bundle url(i.e. from rhohub.com)
rhobundle_zip_url= ”
Build and Launch the App
For iPhone
$ rake run:iphone
For Android
D:\BitlaSoft>rake run:android
For BlackBerry
D:\BitlaSoft>rake run:bb
The Apple App Store Economy – from GIGaOm
GigaOm put together a fantastic App Store’s economics compiled from various sources based on Dec 2009 data.
Here is a quick summary:
- 1,35,000+ Apps
- 28,000+ developers
- Submit your app in less than a weeks time
- 58+ million App Store users
- ~300 million downloads a month
- $250+ million in revenues
- $75 million (30%) to Apple
- $175 million (70%) to developers
Developers – get your acts together – there is tons of money to be made in the App Stores.
- What do you think?
