There is no doubt that carving out a mobile presence is a priority for many companies offering any type of product or service, or for start ups looking to gain rapid exposure. The Apple App Store has over 100,000 apps on it, and the Android platform is gaining ground. Those are just the cool kids – let’s not forget the grandfather of mobile technology, Blackberry. Others in the class include Palm, Symbian and of course, Windows.
Multiple Platforms
With so many platforms available there is a risk of losing focus on developing and producing applications as resources are expended on supporting multiple platforms – a necessary evil as each presents different development environments and eccentricities.
This is why PhoneGap really stands out at the moment as four [1] of the aforementioned platforms share a common factor – a WebKit-based browser. This doesn’t include BlackBerry’s announcement [2] of their new WebKit based browser to come in late 2010, which takes us to five out of the six platforms.
Enter PhoneGap
Where does PhoneGap sit in this picture? Well, it jumps off the canvas and sits in your lap! PhoneGap allows you to develop applications using HTML, CSS and JavaScript and provides a JavaScript API which enables you to interact with a device’s native functionality [3]. In addition to this simple application architecture, PhoneGap comes with build scripts/plugins (PhoneGap extension for XCode) which bundle up your pages into a deployable application.
The packaging and deployment to device for iPhone, Android and Palm was trivial; I can only speculate that the remaining platforms are equally easy to deploy. In light of recent Apple ‘crackdowns’, as of October 7th [4], 2009, it is worth noting that PhoneGap (version 0.8.0 and higher) is Apple approved.
The JavaScript advantage?
Anyone who has used a JavaScript library, Prototype, jQuery, MooTools etc, knows how powerful they can be. Anyone who has not used them can easily pick up JavaScript basics. The guys over at PhoneGap recommend using XUIJS[5] with PhoneGap as it does not contain a lot of cross-browser compatibility overhead and weighs in at Due to the fact that we are ultimately aiming to work inside one browser implementation (WebKit), we are not held hostage by the browser compatibility issues that have haunted JavaScript for so many years. That’s not to say that fragmentation in the mobile world is not an issue [6].
Now, I am not going to try to argue that these HTML/JavaScript apps offer greater performance or a better user experience over their native counterparts. However, I will say that PhoneGap will allow the rapid development of an application for multiple platforms, using a single code base [7]. This is ideal for prototyping or for apps that will have a limited life span and do not warrant the time and investment of producing native apps.Considering all of this in combination with developments coming down the pipeline, most specifically HTML5 (which includes WebSockets and Client-side database storage), the potential for these types of mobile applications is vast and genuinely exciting.
- Android, iPhone (safari), Palm (WebOS) Symbian/S60(WRT) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers#WebKit-based_browsers
- http://devblog.blackberry.com/2010/02/blackberry-webkit-browser-preview-at-mobile-world-congress/
- http://nachbaur.com/blog/phonegap-officially-permitted-on-the-app-store
- Check out the road map for specifics: http://phonegap.pbworks.com/Roadmap
- http://code.google.com/p/xui-js/
- http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/04/mobile-fragmentation-forever/
- ok, you are going to have to tweak it for BlackBerry.