Rhomobile is out with Rhodes 2.0, the newest version of its cross-platform smartphone app development framework. Among the supported platforms, we find iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, Windows Mobile, Symbian and the iPad.
Available for free under the MIT license, Rhodes 2.0 rocks some cool new capabilities such as native mapping across all devices and a metadata framework that supports applications with changing underlying schema. Moreover, there are other enhancements including faster sync and optimized native styling for all smartphones.
That mapping capabilities seem especially interesting. According to Rhomobile’s press release, developers are now able to to display a map with one call to the Rhodes MapView object, which sounds easy (though I haven’t tried it myself).
As for the mentioned “metadata framework,” it’s designed to allow mobile apps to communicate with backend server that have changing schemas. Developers can change a field or attribute in the back-end enterprise application and the change is reflected immediately on the application running on the device…
Interested developers can grab Rhodes 2.0 from Rhomobile’s website and while there, they can also access the complete documentation.