Pathfinder, a software development and user experience design firm, announced the initial release of rails_iui, an open source Rails Plug-In for the iPhone.

The plug-in makes it easier to build iPhone enabled web applications. Rail plugin adds the ability to iUI framework which contains a number of CSS styles and JavaScript event handlers, to make iPhone Web apps look and feel somewhat like native iPhone applications.

“While developing my latest mobile web application with iUI, I realized I was building up a library, so I converted everything to a Rails plug-in,” stated Rappin, creator of the plugin. “Open source is all about sharing what you have learned and making contributions to support the community.””

Currently the plug-in focuses on automating common tasks and streamlining development. Future enhancements include improvements in documentation, testing and leveraging the Rails framework to enhance interactions, especially related to history and back behavior.

To get more information and download the plugin go to here or here.

By Sean Michael Kerner on March 19, 2008

All right here’s the question everyone wants to know – What’s better – Apple iPhone or Google Android?

According to Andrea Gazzaniga, software development manager at mobile open source vendor Funambol the answer is not entirely clear. In a rambling overflow presentation at AjaxWorld’s iPhone Sumitt, Gazzaniga attempted to outline the differences and similiaraties between iPhone and Android.

“iPhone is cool and that’s what’s bringing us all here,” Gazzaniga said. “With Android the claim is that it will be open and we’re hoping it will overcome the closed nature of current mobile development.

Gazzaniga had a few other (not so startling) points such as Android is based on Linux while the iPhone is based on Mac OS. For the most part Gazzaniga implied that Android from an app developers point of view behaves much the same as iPhone, though he did point out a few serious limiations to the iPhone (from what he could tell from the iPhone SDK).

According to Gazzaniga iPhone does not allow in its SDK for background processes. That is an app must close when the users leaves it. The obvious question resulting from that issue then is – how does an application listen for a network event after a user leaver it ? (for instant messaging or sync operations).

There is not official email integration in the iPhone SDK which begs the question  – is it possible to deliver email other than with Apple’s client and built-in protocols?  Gazzaniga also noted that developers of iPhone native applications will need Apple to distribute their applications. As an example Gazzaniga commented that you can’t get Skype for the iPhone today.

Overall though in my view, Gazzaniga’s presentation left the audience with more questions than answers. It will be interesting to see as the iPhone and Android SDKs mature and gain adoption, precisely what the differences between the two are from a practical point of view.

During this week’s AjaxWorld conference, ICEsoft Technologies has unveiled their open source ICEfaces Project.

ICEfaces itself is an Ajax framework that enables developers to easily create server centric rich internet applications in pure Java. The system works by extending JSF (java server faces) which is a component model for JavaEE development.

While working in standart JSF programming envirounment, you have the addition of Automatic AJAX which handles back-end AJAX Framework functionality for them transparently. In addition, a feature known as “AJAX Push” automatically takes care of synchronization between the desktop and the mobile device.

While iPhone was presented as a great platform, Steve Markya CTO of ICEsoft Technologies said it had some deficiencies like memory constraints, small footprint, and inability to support drag-and-drop.

But even with its shortcomings, ICEsoft demonstrated some interesting projects like a program that allows users to “push” conference slides from a desktop to an iPhone and an app to order taxi from iPhone while on business trip, and then receive and view status reports.

Thanks: SeanKerner

In an AjaxWorld Conference this week, Aptana had one of the more impressive presentations on how easy it is to develop Ajax applications for the iPhone.

They presented open source Aptana Studio IDE. It is a full Ajax development environment and it is available as a stand-alone as well as an Eclipse plug-in.

Integration with Eclipse provides developers with an interactive console as well as preview support for iPhone applications. Plug-in also supports preview with which you also see how the application will look like and how it will behave on an iPhone. This is achieved by integrating the plug-in with iPhone emulator.

The demonstration showed how to build a simple application. It was also explained how Aptana Studio includes options that enable developers to take full advantage of the iPhone user interface for sizing, resizing and left-to-right toggling. The result is that developers will get a real sense of what their applications will look like inside of iPhone.

If you would like to give this a try visit Aptana website.