Mobile Web
Whether you call it HTML5, Mobile Web or something else, HTML, CSS and Javascript are very productive tools for building compelling mobile experiences. They’re the fastest way we've found to build elegant, productive UIs with real native feel. You’d be surprised by what's possible.
And it’s not a question of Native vs. Mobile Web: The line between these technologies is fuzzier than most people realize. The fact is, you can produce a native app, leveraging all the power these devices give you, and still build the bulk of the application using mobile web technologies. This saves you time, effort and cost, while giving the app greater portability to other mobile platforms, and to the web itself.
We've built a number of apps that feel native, but which at their core are fundamentally Mobile Web apps. A simple native wrapper is often enough to create the OS integration that makes them feel "native" and that helps you get the apps into the app stores on for each platform.
Behavior Driven Development
If you've read through all of the platform pages, you may have noted a theme: In order to do this well, we need the right BDD tools. Unlike a number of native runtimes, the tools to do basic behavior-driven development for mobile web were for the most part the same tools used to develop traditional web applications. That said, the work we did to develop Jasmine was of course ideally suited to building mobile web applications. Jasmine fits the mobile application lifecycle perfectly. And of course it also suits our traditional web application development style as well. That’s part of why it’s become so popular in the Rails community generally.