All Rhodes Lead To Mobile

One of the reasons I love what I do is that every day I find something–some project, some person, some thought–that expands my thinking.  This constant adventure in software development keeps me learning and I love it.  Recently, I discovered Rhodes, the cross-platform mobile application development framework.

The Rhodes framework is an open source Ruby-based platform for building locally executing, device-optimized mobile applications. It is similar in concept to MVC frameworks such as Rails, Merb and Camping but much lighter weight (and hence executable on a mobile device) than any of these. Along the way of course, we had to implement Ruby for these device operating systems (iPhone, Windows Mobile, RIM and Symbian).

You should also know, since I am a Rubyist by nature, I was like a giddy schoolgrrl when I discovered I could write my applications in very familiar and friendly Ruby, with ERB template views!  Oh, and I can deploy to all the major platforms from one code-base (Android coming soon!)? Hell yeah.

So, over the next few months, I will be digging into this project–contributing code to the core, if I can–and developing some apps for mobile devices with a motley crew of lads, mostly on the down-low.  But I’ll blog about it here, so stay tuned.