REDWOOD CITY, CALIFORNIA and LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM--(Marketwire) - Funambol, the open source mobile cloud company, today introduced an open source framework to ease development of sync-centric apps for smartphones. Funambol CAPRI (Cross-platform App Programming Rich Interface) lets developers build a single web app that runs on all smartphones with a WebKit browser, including iPhone, BlackBerry, Android and Nokia.

CAPRI is based on AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), a programming approach for interactive web applications that is familiar to tens of thousands of developers. CAPRI includes functions that enable smartphone apps to sync with 'cloud-based services' and the native address book on handsets, making it easier to create mobile apps that sync diverse data and media with the cloud. Currently, developers must rewrite and re-test apps for different mobile devices and re-deploy them on multiple app stores. CAPRI eliminates 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. From an end user perspective, CAPRI apps are no different than native apps.

"Developing separate native apps for major smartphone platforms is expensive and time consuming as it requires multiple programming models, specialized skillsets and extensive testing," said Fabrizio Capobianco, Funambol CEO. "CAPRI uses AJAX to build cross-platform sync apps for smartphones. Its basis on open source helps address the device fragmentation issue facing the industry."

The open source CAPRI software will be available shortly. For more information, visit its project page on the Funambol Forge at http://capri.forge.funambol.org. Funambol is working with the developer community to enhance CAPRI and invites interested parties to participate in the project.

About Funambol

Funambol is the open source mobile cloud company that provides sync and device management for billions of mobile phones and connected devices. Funambol open source has been downloaded four million times by 50,000 developers in 200 countries, making it the #1 mobile open source server project. The commercial version of Funambol has been deployed by top mobile operators, device manufacturers, internet companies, service providers and ISVs. Funambol is headquartered in Silicon Valley with R&D in Europe. For more information, please visit http://www.funambol.com or http://twitter.com/funambol.