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.
