The Rhomobile Beginner's guide will speak to every developer's mind, and especially to the technocrats looking for a reliable cross-platform framework encouraging them to explore and try out these wonderful products by Rhomobile. This book guides you step by step to build an enterprise mobile application from scratch, through to deployment.
Chapter 1, What is Rhomobile?: In this chapter, we will briefly discuss the various products of Rhomobile and their architecture.
Chapter 2, Installation and Configuration—How to Set Off: In this chapter, we will learn to install the necessary softwares that are required before developing our mobile application using Rhomobile.
Chapter 3, Instant Gratification—Create Your First Application: In this chapter, we will create our first application and understand how Rhodes structures the application.
Chapter 4, Rhom—Playing with the Local Database: In this chapter, we'll explore Rhom, which is an Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) provided by Rhodes and take a look at how it manipulates data in our application. We'll find how ORM manages table relationships in this chapter and also dig into the ORM object life cycle.
Chapter 5, RhoSync—Synchronizing your data: In this chapter, we will learn about the synchronization framework RhoSync that keeps application data current and available on user's smart phones. We will create a sample RhoSync application and connect with a Rails application to put the current data on the device.
Chapter 6, Metadata and Push—Creating Agile Views: In this chapter, we will learn about a powerful feature of RhoSync called metadata and also configuring Push messages to the client. We will enhance the application created in the earlier chapter with metadata and Push.
Chapter 7, Native User Interface—Cosmetics for Your Smart Phones: In this chapter, we will learn about Native User Interface for different phones. We will perform device-specific operations to give a more native look to our application.
Chapter 8, Unit Testing and Logging—Writing Better Code: In this chapter, we will learn about testing and logging. We will write unit tests for both Rhodes and RhoSync applications. We will also learn to check logs in different devices.
Chapter 9, RhoHub—Deploying to Cloud: In this chapter, we will host our RhoSync application to RhoHub using Git and learn to create build for our Rhodes application.
Chapter 10, Rhodes Power Unleashed: In this chapter, we will learn about the Rhodes competence to access device-specific capabilities such as GPS, PIM, camera, System attributes, and many more functionalities.
This book is for developers who are looking to build mobile applications. They may include the ones who are looking for a deep understanding of Rhomobile or they may be completely new to these products.
Familiarity with HTML, CSS, and Ruby will give you an extra edge but you do not need to be an expert on these topics.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "The update_attributes call then takes the rest of the parameters from the request and applies them to this record."
A block of code is set as follows:
<div class="toolbar">
<% if SyncEngine::logged_in > 0 %>
<div class="leftItem blueButton">
<a href="<%= url_for :controller => :Settings, :action => :When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items will be shown in bold:
<div class="rightItem regularButton"> <a class="flip" href="<%= url_for :controller => :Settings, :action => :logout %>">Logout</a> </div
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
sudo apt-get install ruby1.9.1-full
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "run the executable file and click Next".
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