RIA

You write, as we describe, your controllers in Ruby, and you are going to be making library calls to the various device capabilities that are exposed there, GPS, PIM, Contacts, push capabilities, and camera support etc. Then you have your external templates that you do your user interfaces with and when you are done then you run a build task that's a rake task like any other build task in a Ruby environment. And you will build a native executable for each different device OS, one of the key differentiators of a Rhodes built app versus a whole earlier generation of mobile technologies going back more like eight years ago if you were to do this, the typical approach was people would have their own non HTML based but sort of proprietary ways of defining apps, they would have an interpreter that was on the phone, some kind of runner.

And what they would do is define their app, the user would download the interpreter on the phone and then they would be able to download these application abstractions. So pretty much all of the people that were in "enterprise mobility" that started six-seven years ago, that is what they would have, that was the right thing to do at the time. In 2009, number one that approach which absolutely made sense for devices with limited CPU and memory is completely unnecessary in the world of modern smart phones. And number two: it's no longer acceptable so the app store has made it very clear that that will not fly. And those expectations have bled over from the app store to other device OSes and the users of really all those device OSes people want native apps, and native executables, they are not going to download some kind of intermediate interpreter runner and then download apps for it. So that has pretty much vanished from the smart phones, so it's a good question what do you end up with when you do a build you end up with a native IPhone apps, your .cab files for Window Mobile, your cad files for Blackberry, .sis files for Symbian and your .apk files for Android.

And then you just do what you would normally do to load apps on the phone. One is obviously if you want to get to the app store then you submit your app to the app store in other cases you could take those native executables and put them up on your website, and then we also have a hosted development as a service, where we actually offer a vending machine or visioning machine so that once you have done your builds, you want to give out the URL to people we'll provide that as well.