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Amid the OS wars, cross-platform tools that protect developers from having to choose one system or another are vital. The problem is, they too are becoming a battleground for the major names, such as Nokia's Qt, Adobe's Flash/Air and Oracle's Java. Open web tools like HTML5 will be critical but are immature and not yet ideal for all mobile devices. Into this void, several start-ups are stepping with their independent tools, one of them being Rhomobile, which has upgraded its Rhodes mobile apps framework.

Rhomobile is focused on heavy duty applications, particularly those for business users and devices, and Rhodes 2.0 promises easier integration with server-side enterprise apps - a differentiator that could also enhance its future role in cloud-based services for handsets. Its upgraded version also supports bidirectional, streaming multimedia, another key trend in the way that web content is delivered and shared.

The new release of the Rhodes system, which enables development of cross-platform, native applications for smartphones, provides a metadata framework, targeting the same role in enterprise software as Google's push behind HTML5 and native APIs. The metadata framework allows apps to work with a given piece of software even if this has been heavily customized by an enterprise or carrier. CEO Adum Blum told Network World: "What the metadata framework lets you do is allow you to write an application where none of the fields or attributes are hard coded," Blum said, making it independent of the database structure or back end app in use.

Rhodes uses common APIs that expose device capabilities, and supports apps for Symbian, Android, Windows Mobile, iPhone and RIM. It will add Windows Phone 7 later this year, in release 2.1. Its Model View Controller framework for native development allows for views written in HTML. As well as HTML, its main language is the open source Ruby - Rhodes is a lightweight version of the PC implementation, Ruby on Rails.

The latest version also features a faster sync server, which takes data from back end systems and makes it available offline to the phone. The sync server services are the main revenue stream for Rhomobile, via its RhoHub hosted service. It offers both a commercial and an open source license of its software. It is changing its licensing from the GPL to the MIT system, which means it will make the commercial version free like the open one, rather than charging a $500 fee.

Rhomobile was founded in 2008 by Blum, a veteran of Mobio Networks and Good Technology, with seed capital from vSpring Capital. Its main competitor, it says, is Phonegap, which works on iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry, and uses JavaScript.

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