Mobile development for Medicine , Developer tools#01 : Rhomobile
Mobile development is a tricky area for many developers , because there was no many choices to ease development on mobile and hand-held devices , also the hardware devices were not that flexible for adapting , trying and play around which geeks used to do .
These days , those problems are gone , and the area of mobile development now covered with many frameworks , libraries , tools , IDEs and documentations .
I decided to write series of articles to list the open source mobile developer tools , needed for developing mobile applications , which will be helpful for medical and health care related developers .
Rhomobile :
is a set of tools , built to ease development and usability of application for smartphones :
Rhodes : is the development framework for building a mobile applications on many mobile operatinge systems : (iPhone, Windows Mobile, RIM, Symbian and Android) .
advantage of Rhodes :
- Building the application with common developer technologies , HTML and Ruby .
- Work in almost all known mobile operating systems . ( build once run on all ) ,
- It has an access to device hardware features : GPS , Camera ,
- Open source technology licensed under : GPL v3 ,
- Cheap for commercial use : about $500 ,
- Play nice with its colleagues : RhoSync , and RhoHub .
RhoSync : is more like Google gear which is very handy to deal with data when there is no internet .
RhoHub : is a hosting service for hosting application built with Rhomobile .
Documentation :
Rhomobile is seems to be well documented project with rich wiki , with some video introductions , the training they offer is more about people who can get to sunny Cupertino, California , in first Friday of every month .
Support :
Even RhoMobile has such great tools and services for building native mobile applications for different mobile operating systems , there’ll be one obstacle to use is building a good community for support , discussions , upgrade and feed the community with examples and applications with tutorials . which seems in the right way of doing this as rails .
Idea :
as an old ruby / rails developer , i believe its the right time to think in the box and consider building medical application for mobiles now is the right idea with the right tools . especially when the obstacles which scares the mobile application developers mainly are gone with RhoSync and RhoHub .
Hamza Emadeen Mousa
