Today at TechCrunch50, Mytopia debuted its cross-platform development framework called RUGS.
The idea is simple: code once, and an application is automatically translated for compatibility on a range of mobile and Web platforms. RUGS applications are running natively on each platform, with porting solutions for Flash and every major mobile operating system. They demonstrated support for Windows Mobile, iPhone, BlackBerry, Symbian, Palm OS - even the Android emulator.
Mytopia seems to be strongly focused not only on cross-platform compatibility, but cross-platform communication, demonstrating an impressive multiplayer communication aspect of the framework. First they showed a Facebook version of a multiplayer Poker game they’d written on the RUGS framework - then showed the same game running in perfect sync on all of the aforementioned mobile platforms.
After a unique Eclipse development ID is acquired, developers are able to use common programming languages (C, Actionscript 3, Java) they already know to write their applications. The automated translation does require applications to be written with RUGS compliancy in mind - while applications already at the compiling stage can be made RUGS compatible, it might require a bit of manual porting legwork.
At least on stage, the idea seems outstanding. It’ll be interesting to see just how well the development process works once coders have gotten their hands on the tools and really started cracking away. If RUGS compliancy doesn’t create obstacles, it could be an outstanding means of getting applications into far more hands with both lower costs and shorter dev cycles. Licensing will be done per project, and Mytopia expects to offer their tools to developers at the end of the year.
Watch the video of Mytopia’s presentation here.
Interesting technology. This type of technology needs to become simpler to code across the platforms, it is still in its early days and coding across my Blackberry to the iPhone to the Nokia cell phone is a bit pain.
Can you clarify;
“every major mobile operating system”
Yet, you didn’t list iPhone OS, although it seems to be pictured.
This sounds truly amazing, I’ve wanted to delve into iPhone development don’t have inclination (time) to learn Objective-C.
Thanks - fixed. It does indeed support iPhone/iPod Touch, with support for accelerometer, touchscreen input, etc.
No mention of the iPhone one way or the other? Bad reporter. No cookie.
Why do I have to sign in to use this. No thanks.
I like the idea very much. It will help developers especially in the mobile platforms. Cool.
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This already exists. It is called Bando. I has been developped in the real broadcast world. It is deployed on 10 million Set-top boxes and has been ported to mobile phones. It is now used by mob-it in France, New Vision Partners in Malaysia.
The language is called BandoXML (XML DTD) and is linked to thin software client (Bando Player), written for each OS.
It works perfectly well even if it needs improvement. Patents are existing (10 years old that covers most parts of the world).
Morover, the technology is licensed and has been for sale as a package, recently… If interested in any way : jc@nptv.fr
This is just a virtual machine nothing revolutionary. I’m making such things since i remember myself and the idea is as old as computing itself (search for p-Code and UCSD Pascal for a relatively recent example - although Java itself is the same thing, the J2ME API is implemented in desktop and applets so technically one could write a J2ME game and have it running everywhere). Also Flash itself is exactly the same thing actually, you just replace the RUGS player with the Flash player. Of course this doesn’t mean that it works with today’s phones but in reality it isn’t as important as they make it sound.
Unfortunately the terms of the iPhone SDK don’t allow virtual machines so I wouldn’t count on seeing this on the iPhone unless Apple changes those terms.
There seems to be some technical confusion in the recent comments regarding our platform, so let me take this opportunity to answer some of the critics:
“This already exists. It is called Bando.”
Try Googling ‘Bando’ and see what you find.
“This is just a virtual machine nothing revolutionary.”
It’s not a virtual machine in the classic java VM machine sense of the word, if anything it is more similar to high-level virtual machines that abstract high level actions (draw image, connect socket, etc.) from their platform specific implementation. Java and Flash are not great examples of competing technologies, but regardless we provide faster performance and a smaller footprint than both, not to mention coverage of all popular smartphones today.
“Unfortunately the terms of the iPhone SDK don’t allow virtual machines so I wouldn’t count on seeing this on the iPhone unless Apple changes those terms”
Commenter was likely confused by the previous post. The above statement is factually accurate in regards to the iPhone SDK but irrelevant to Mytopia’s platform. We are not running on virtual machines – we are running native iPhone apps.
Yotam Shacham
CTO
Mytopia.com