Rhodes 1.4 mobile framework released

Rhomobile has announced the release of version 1.4 of its open source Ruby-based framework called Rhodes. Rhodes allows developers to create platform independent applications using HTML code that can be translated into device-optimised native mobile application for a number of smartphone operating systems, including Google's Android OS, Apple's iPhone OS, Windows Mobile, Symbian and RIM's BlackBerry.

The latest release features support for the BlackBerry 5.0 Java Development Environment, several new Ruby gems and native mapping for BlackBerry. Rhodes now also includes an extension framework for adding third party extensions to the screen size API, which, the developers note, will help developers "write apps that handle the iPad gracefully". Other notable changes include improvements to the run framework that allows a preview test of code on a phone, a Mac OSX debugger and improvements to logging.

More details about Rhodes 1.4 can be found in the release announcement. Rhodes 1.4 is available to download from Github. Open source developers can use Rhodes to create their applications under the version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GPLv3) at no charge. However, non-open source applications require a commercial use license that costs $500 per application and includes an unlimited number of users.

(crve)