Rhodes

The Rhodes framework is a framework for building locally executing, device-optimized mobile applications for smartphone devices. These applications are optimized for interacting with transactional enterprise application backends (with synced local data via RhoSync). Rhodes is now available for iPhone, Windows Mobile, Research in Motion (Blackberry) and Symbian smartphones.

Rhodes is available as an open source product under the MIT license. For developers interested a commercial license is still available.

INTRODUCTION

Rhodes takes much of its inspiration from web-oriented MVC style frameworks such as Ruby on Rails. However it has several simplifications and optimizations for the mobile scenario. Some of these are to make it easier for the developer. Most of them are to keep the framework as lightweight as possible to be able to run on mobile devices with limited memory. As with developing apps on any good app framework (Rails, Merb, Django), building a Rhodes mobile application consists of building a set of files and putting them into the right directories for the respective models.

STARTING A RHODES APPLICATION

Install Rhodes:

gem install rhodes

APPLICATION GENERATOR

Rhodes features an application generator called rhogen that generates a controller and views for a given model. The syntax for running Rhogen is:

rhogen app appname

This will generate a config.rb and an index.html file. Currently config.rb is focused on describing what source to sync with. Modify the URL that you see in this file with whatever your RhoSync server URL and source ID are for this particular “source” or data model. It is assumed that you’ve already set up a RhoSync “source adapter” as described by the RhoSync docs.

Generate a Model and Associated Controller and Templates

rhogen model modelname options

This will generate a controller as the file controller.rb and several views as action-name.erb (corresponding to the actions below). Each Rhodes model/controller pair has several actions to perform basic CRUD (create, read, update and delete) on the object generated by default by the scaffold . Specifically the template views generated are:

• index – to list all objects
• new – to display the editing form for creating a new object
• edit – to edit the actual object
• show – to show the object attributes

MORE RESOURCES

There is a tutorial available on the Rhomobile site. This includes thorough and current platform by platform build instructions.

The Rhodes Developer Reference for full documentation on the Rhodes framework.

For further questions email us or join the Google Group.

For questions on licensing contact our sales team