Mobile Application Development Using PhoneGap
Introduction to PhoneGap Development
PhoneGap is an open source framework for building cross-platform mobile applications with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Introduction:
PhoneGap was born out of iPhoneDevCamp in 2008, where it was created simply because there were not a lot of Objective-C developers in comparison to Web Developers. The challenge was to put together a framework that would allow web developers to use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to code applications that could take advantage of the native functionality of the mobile device, such as the Camera, Storage, and GeoLocation features. Initially built to work with the iPhone, within a year PhoneGap was growing and beginning to support Android too.
PhoneGap was born out of iPhoneDevCamp in 2008, where it was created simply because there were not a lot of Objective-C developers in comparison to Web Developers. The challenge was to put together a framework that would allow web developers to use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to code applications that could take advantage of the native functionality of the mobile device, such as the Camera, Storage, and GeoLocation features. Initially built to work with the iPhone, within a year PhoneGap was growing and beginning to support Android too.
Applications built with PhoneGap are not just like normal mobile web sites. PhoneGap applications are able to interact with mobile device hardware, such as the Accelerometer or GPS, in ways that are unavailable to normal web applications.
PhoneGap supports a number of different mobile platforms, including:Android
- iPhone
- Blackberry
- Symbian
- Palm
The PhoneGap SDK provides an API that is an abstraction layer providing the developer with access to hardware and platform specific features. As PhoneGap abstracts the native mobile platform, the same code can be used on multiple mobile platform with little or no change, making your application available to a wider audience.
Hardware specific features supported by the PhoneGap API include:
- Geolocation
- Vibration
- Accelerometer
- Sound
Requirements:
If you want to develop for iOS, you will need:
- An intel-based Apple Computer
- iPhone SDK
- Xcode
- Mac OS X Snow Leopard
if you are developing for Android, you will need:
- Android NDK
- Android SDK
- There are also some additional PhoenGap specific requirements for Android development, including:
- 1. Eclipse IDE
- 2. ADT plugin for Eclipse
- 3. Apache Ant
- 4. Ruby
- 5. Git Bash (Windows Only)