Rhomobile make open source development software that allows a developer to build great native software with more familiar code. The company recently wrote about the launch of RIM’s Widget SDK on their blog, and it points out the fact that web development for mobile is a trend in the industry.
From their blog: “The good news for us is that RIM’s announcement is just part of a much larger trend. Nokia also does this with their Web Runtime toolkit. iPhone developers have many options to use web skills for rich native apps: either our Rhodes framework or frameworks such as PhoneGap, Corona, Titanium or Nimblekit. Android developers can write native apps with HTML using Rhodes, PhoneGap, Corona or Titanium. With third party JavaScript libraries such as JQTouch for iPhone and Android (which we highly recommend and use often in combination with Rhodes apps) such apps can have all the animated pop and dazzle of something you might write in Objective C. Without the pain of throwing away 25 years of progress in more advanced programming languages.
To take a closer look at what RIM has delivered it does appear that it’s still a subset of what we offer with no camera support and no native mapping. The big difference however is that we’re the only framework available for all smartphones and the only framework that provides synchronization (an easy way to enable current information to be available locally on user’s devices even when they are offline). I’m excited about seeing BlackBerry developers use the Widget SDK to learn “web-based for native” and then be that much more ready to use our framework on other devices and to upgrade what they’ve done for BlackBerries to be true enterprise apps, complete with synchronized data.”
Interesting that Rhomobile points out the SDK has no camera or native mapping support. While the camera and maps are not all that common in a basic app, it is still very limiting to not offer the services for developers. Have any developers out there began delving into the Widget SDK to confirm?
For the week of March 10th. we’ve got Neil Sainsbury, developer of 
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