Chapter 5. PhoneGap

The last framework we are going to see in this book is PhoneGap, an innovative system that allows developers to package web applications as native mobile apps.

PhoneGap was created by a company called Nitobi, which was acquired by Adobe. Furthermore, PhoneGap has become an official project of the Apache Foundation and it is called now Apache Cordova^[21]. Technically speaking, it can be said that PhoneGap is a distribution of Apache Cordova.

Note

At the time of this writing, the current stable version of PhoneGap is version 1.7.0.

Introduction

PhoneGap wraps applications created using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript into native applications, using the native web browser component provided by most native smartphone development toolkits.

As Adobe promotes it, PhoneGap is actually two things:

Wrapper: PhoneGap takes your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files and packages them in such a way that can be deployed to an online store.
Bridge: PhoneGap also provides mechanisms to augment HTML5 web applications, allowing them to access and consume information and services otherwise available only to native applications, such as the local address book, the notification system, sounds, and other utilities.