Writing Rich Mobile Phone Applications in Javascript with PhoneGap
To date, mobile phone applications that wish to take advantage of phones’ unique abilities such as GPS location, vibration and accelerometers have needed native code — for example, Objective C for the iPhone — to do so. The mobile Web, by contrast, has been limited to the same set of Javascript tools that are available on desktops. This means that these APIs, which are critical to the success of many mobile applications, are unavailable to the web developer. Mobile Gmail can’t help you find e-mails that you sent in a particular location, though a native Gmail application might be able to.
Enter PhoneGap, a multiplatform tool that proposes to change all this. PhoneGap, for iPhone, Blackberry and Android, can be packaged as a library into a mobile application (really a thin wrapper around a web browser) that you point at your web site. Then, your web site gains a Javascript API to all the rich functionality described before. Viola, a mobile Gmail web site with location tracking!
PhoneGap could open up development opportunities to those without the time to learn those pesky new APIs, who want to develop multiplatform mobile applications, or who simply find web development a more cuddly environment.
- Michael Bernstein