Surging popularity for rich mobile applications has left many once cutting edge Ruby developers feeling left behind. Developing for Android, the iPhone, and Blackberry requires completely different skill sets (Objective-C, Java, and new APIs). And just serving up a lite version of your customer’s web site is only a half-baked solution.
Consider this alternative technology stack for mobile devices:
The WebKit rendering engine on phones lets you build applications with standard HTML, CSS and Javascript. Web content can live locally, remotely, or both.
The HTML 5 specification gives you local persistent storage via a Javascript interface to SQLite.
The PhoneGap project (http://phonegap.com) exposes all the new exciting mobile features (GPS, accelerometer, phone, vibration, sound) through a common Javascript API.
Now Rubyists can create “native” mobile applications for all 3 platforms simultaneously using their favorite web development tools. And all the business logic can be served directly from their RESTful Rails application!
Ben is the co-founder and CTO of Mobile Commons, a mobile technology company focusing on SMS & voice applications. He is active in the New York City Ruby community and a contributer to a number of open-source Ruby libraries.