ReadWriteWeb

This year enterprise 2.0 went from being a fringe idea to being mainstream as CIOs started asking "how?" instead of "why?" Big name vendors entered the marketplace with new products and existing vendors released new versions with innovative new features.

We chose to break up the enterprise products of the year up into categories: new product, e-mail, mobile, development tool, database, social software suite, social CRM, microblogging, conferencing and CMS. Products were evaluated based on market performance, innovation, utility, impact on the space as a whole and improvement over last year. Each of these products either changed the game, or won it.

Like we said earlier this week mobile enterprise space is heating up. This week alone saw the launch of three new tools for building mobile enterprise apps. Forrester has given some advice to enterprises for how to get started in mobile enterprise development, which the firm suggests needs to move into the mainstream of enterprise development. Here's a brief guide to some of the new tools enterprises have at their disposal for mobilizing their work force.

Update: See also 3 More Ways to Mobilize Enterprise Applications

Rhomobile announced today the new version of its enterprise-focused smartphone app development framework: Rhodes 2.0. Developers can use the now-free Rhodes 2.0 to build native yet cross-platform apps for the iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry, Android, Windows Mobile and Symbian phones using HTML, CSS and Javascript.

PhoneGap is a very interesting development platform for mobile applications that lets developers build apps that work for multiple devices, including the iPhone, using only HTML and Javascript. That means far more people are able to develop mobile applications.

Recently, though, Apple has been rejecting an unusual number of apps built with PhoneGap from its app store. The company's reasons don't seem clear and developers want to know what's going on. We discuss three possible explanations below, but ultimately the problem appears to come down to the tight control that Apple maintains over the app store and iPhone.