Gruber just posted a link to an interview of Ryan Singer from 37signals, where Singer mentioned a mobile HTML5 framework. That’s pretty big stuff – Ruby on Rails is doing pretty good, and a mobile framework in the same style would be quite awesome, since it according to Singer uses Coffeescript – a way more human friendly, Ruby like style of writing Javascript (a programmer friend of mine is totally in love with it).

We’ve got a lot of Javascript frameworks for mobile devices these days. The first one I got in touch with (no pun intended, promise) was jQTouch – a simple and stylish jQuery framework mainly for iOS. That one evolved into Sencha Touch (now based on Ext.js), and the jQuery group themselves recently released jQuery Mobile with support for a lot of phones and operating systems. Two more heavy-weight guys are Sproutcore and Cappuccino. Isn’t the market over-saturated soon? Will this mobile framework by 37signals become just one in a million, or might it be “the one”?

Before everybody go nuts, it’s worth noting that Sam Stephenson (37signals, creator of Prototype.js) stated this in a comment on the interview:

Hey folks, there’s nothing to see here right now. We spent three weeks experimenting with some new tech to see what we could build, and ended up with something that looks a bit like Rails, but entirely client-side and written in CoffeeScript.

The project driving the framework—an HTML5 mobile UI for Basecamp—has been on hold for about a month now, and we’re still a ways off from having anything to show. It just isn’t a priority for us right now. When (or if) we do have something we’ll be sure to post about it on our blog.

That is, it’s not a silver bullet from 37signals for writing mobile apps (yet). It’s very, very interesting – yes – but nothing to start drooling over (yet). Personally, I’m in agony, since I’ve got another framework to put on my “Learn/Have A Closer Look At” list.

Update, April 15th 2011: turned out the framework 37signals was experimenting with was indeed Backbone.js – an open source Javascript library which helps you structure your code in JS-heavy applications according to the MVC pattern (source).