Pathfinder’s Noel Rappin Unveils Rails Plug-In for iPhone Applications

(Chicago, IL) Pathfinder, a leading software development and user experience design firm, announced the initial release of rails_iui, an open source Rails Plug-In for the iPhone created by Noel Rappin.

“Due to the iPhone’s popularity, Mobile Safari has quickly become the most commonly used mobile web browser in the United States, and it’s market share continues to increase”, stated Noel Rappin, author of ‘Professional Ruby on Rails’ and Pathfinder’s Vice President of Rails Development. “Many developers are choosing to redesign their sites to take advantage of the unique features and user model provided by the iPhone and iPod touch.”

Mobile Safari is a new paradigm for web browsing that utilizes the iPhone’s popular touch screen display along with new styles of interactions that include tap, pinch and zoom for bringing the content into view.

The plug-in is a Rails wrapper which leverages the iUI toolkit for building iPhone enabled web applications. The iUI framework was created by Joe Hewitt, and simplifies iPhone web development. It 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. “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.

For more detailed information or to download the plug-in, visit: Rails Plug-In for iPhone Applications

Pathfinder also maintains Really Simple History (RSH), which is an open source lightweight JavaScript library for the management of bookmarking and browser history in Ajax/DHTML applications.

About Pathfinder Development

Headquartered in Chicago, Pathfinder specializes in software development and user experience design. For over a decade, Pathfinder has delivered software applications that are easy to use, providing clients with the technology to enable business breakthroughs and competitive advantage. Pathfinder’s clients range from early-stage startups to Fortune 500 companies across a wide array of industries, including energy, healthcare, insurance, financial services, media and publishing. For more information, contact Eleanor Taylor at 312-372-1058 or etaylor@pathf.com, or visit http://www.pathf.com.