Rhodes 3.0 gains NFC & Windows Phone 7 support

Rhomobile has announced the release of version 3.0 of Rhodes, its open source mobile application development framework. The Ruby-based framework allows developers to create native applications for various mobile platforms, including Android, BlackBerry, iOS, Symbian, WebOS and Windows Mobile.

Rhodes 3.0 features the addition of support for Near Field Communication (NFC) on Android devices, allowing apps to read and write to nearly any standard NFC tag, provided the device hardware supports it – Google included NFC support in version 2.3 of its mobile OS and in the Nexus S. While Windows Mobile (6.5) was previously supported, version 3.0 of Rhodes is the first release to include such capabilities for Microsoft's latest Windows Phone 7 platform.

The company also offers the RhoSync synchronisation server, which is required for synchronising contents with data that is stored offline. However, to use it, developers must either purchase a commercial licence when development begins or open source their app under the GPL. In addition, RhoHub provides a development environment for Rhodes via SaaS (Software as a Service). RhoStudio, an Eclipse plug-in for developing Rhodes and RhoSync applications, is also included in version 3.0.

Details about Rhodes 3.0 and NFC support can be found in a post on the Rhomobile blog. Rhodes 3.0 is available to download from the project's web site and documentation is provided. Hosted on GitHub, Rhodes source code is released under the MIT Licence. Rhomobile also offers an Enterprise Licence for organisations that require commercial support.

See also:

• Rhomobile 2.0 now available for developing platform-independent phone apps, a report from The H.

(crve)