While Mobile Orchard and most developers focus on the development of “regular” iPhone applications using the iPhone SDK, it’s also possible to develop iPhone-specific apps as “webapps.” If you’ve used Google Calendar or Google Mail from your phone, you’ll have seen an iPhone “webapp” in action. While webapps can’t get access to all of the goodies offered by the iPhone SDK, they’re more than adequate for many tasks – they also don’t need to be “approved” and won’t appear on the App Store.
You can use any language to develop an iPhone webapp (since the files are all hosted on your own servers), but Ben Brinckerhoff has put together an excellent tutorial demonstrating how to build an iPhone webapp in just 50 lines of code using Ruby, Sinatra (a lightweight Web framework) and iUI (an iPhone-specific style and JavaScript framework). Even if you don’t have any Ruby experience, the tutorial is detailed enough that you can either follow along or adapt the techniques to your language of choice.
If you’re interested to see what iPhone webapps are available, Apple has an official index of iPhone webapps. Currently there are over 3000!
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