Funambol parts clouds over cross platform app framework

Open source mobile service company Funambol on Tuesday launched a framework designed to ease development of sync-centric apps for smartphones. The firm, which provides cloud-based services for syncing and device management, aims to let developers build a single web app that runs on all smartphones with a WebKit browser, including iPhone, BlackBerry, Android and Nokia.

The CAPRI (Cross-platform App Programming Rich Interface) framework is based on AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), which is already familiar to tens of thousands of developers. CAPRI enables smartphone apps and the native address book on handsets to sync with cloud-based services.

It’s yet another crack at the ‘write once, run anywhere’ aspiration, aiming to eliminate the need for separate native apps by providing a cross-platform framework to write a single app that runs across smartphones, speeding time-to-market, instead of developers rewriting apps for different mobile devices and re-deploying them on multiple app stores.