Heidi Utley, one of the members of our mobile practice, has been working with PhoneGap for one of our clients. She decided to create a series of posts focusing on using PhoneGap for iPhone development.
This first one discusses the project structure. Future posts will review the PhoneGap API, installing a third party plugin, and last building your own PhoneGap plugin.
What is PhoneGap?
PhoneGap is an open source framework for writing applications using typical web technologies like HTML, CSS, and javascript. The PhoneGap architecture supplies javascript wrappers that allow a developer to access native phone features (like contacts, GPS, and the camera) by writing their app against the PhoneGap javascript API.
The basic gist is that the typical web developer will be able to write a standalone HTML/CSS/javascript application that runs in a WebKit browser with access to native functions just by calling the PhoneGap javascript. PhoneGap aides the developer by abstracting the complexities of native development by allowing the developer to write the app in well-known technology without having to learn the intricacies of each mobile platform and thereby hiding the complexity of writing the same application multiple times in various native languages (like Objective-C for the iPhone or Java for Android).
Stay tuned as we have more discussions around mobile development. Our team continues with their research, for Chariot’s own projects (our conference app for Philly ETE) and for our clients.