At Toura, we’ve been working for nearly two years on what it means to create content-rich mobile applications. Over the course of that time, we’ve developed two powerful tools: a web-based system for arranging content, media, and data into a compelling experience; and a content publishing system that turns the output of that system into a responsive, native mobile application using HTML5 technologies.
Our tools draw heavily on open-source technologies — Rails, Dojo, and PhoneGap, to name just a few — and today we’re happy to announce that we’ll be making our own entry into the world of open-source by releasing our content publishing system, which we’ve code-named Mulberry.
With Mulberry, developers can scaffold, configure, customize, test, and deploy mobile apps using the web technologies they already know. Developers can use CSS3 to apply unique styles to a solid base; they can use a simple JavaScript API to create and integrate custom components; and they can take advantage of built-in systems for enabling features like over-the-air updates, social integration, and more.
Why open source? Aside from the fact that we’ve benefited from it so heavily in our efforts, we also look to success stories like WordPress. By making it easy for developers to use, extend, and improve the platform, an enormous community emerged, and with it came an unrivaled ecosystem of plugins and themes — something no single company ever could have achieved with closed technology. Over the years, WordPress became the de facto server-side software for creating content sites, and these days it is known and respected far beyond the developer community where it got its start.
An ecosystem and community like that benefits us, and it benefits our users. Toura gains valuable learning, as it sees how developers use the system, where it excels and where it falls short. Our users get access to the expertise of not just a company, but a community — something money can’t buy. They also get access to the ecosystem of components, themes, and more that will emerge.
We’re in the midst of a closed alpha of the Mulberry platform with a few select developers, dotting our i’s and crossing our t’s, but you can look for the code to appear on GitHub in the next few weeks. In the meantime, you can learn more about Mulberry and sign up to participate in the alpha.
