Rhodes: A Smartphone Application Framework

Earlier this week I saw a presentation by Adam from Rhomobile on their application framework for smartphones. At a high level, this framework will allow you to write smartphone apps that will run on the six major platforms: iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Palm, and Symbian.

The framework is sort of like Rails for smartphones. You write your apps using a standard web technologies like HTML. The idea is to have Rails like erb files that render on the phone. They also provide Rhosync, which supports interaction between your app and back end web services. Presumably this makes it easy for your application to gracefully handle being connected and disconnected at random.

If you're thinking about building an application for more than one platform, this seems like a great way to go.

The project is open source but it seems that you will need to pay licensing fees if you're going to use it in any serious way. Check out the source at github here.