PhoneGap To The Rescue of All ! A technology enthusiast like me gets the kicks when I read about the new devices and funky gadgets launched every other day. But, the die-hard programmer in me surfaces back every time and sets the writer in me thinking – “How do these guys manage?” iOS, Android, Windows Phone. The list is endless. How difficult it must be to manage the very same apps on these diverse platforms and not to think of the bug fixes. Uniformity in diversity is the biggest challenge for the performance of mobile applications and enterprise solutions across the ever increasing mobile devices and their varied technologies. The gap is widening between the platforms like iOS, Android, Blackberry and Windows.
Native Applications are those developed for a specific mobile platform using the development tools and language it supports, like Objective C with iOS, Java with Android and more. Native Apps, work only on the platform for which they have been developed. But when the applications need to work across multiple platforms and devices, different sets of code needs to be written, compiled and maintained for each platform. Efforts of development, deployment and maintenance are directly multiplied by the number of platforms catered to by the app. Cross Platform Applications Development using HTML5, JavaScript and CSS3 use standardized web development technologies which are software and hardware independent, giving the Applications and Solutions the ability to perform anywhere and everywhere. Though the developers can create intricate apps entirely with HTML5 or JavaScript, the character and nativity of the app is lost forever in cross platform development. It is an accepted fact that native apps look and run the best, demonstrating a strong feel of the platform, while cross platform apps adapt to all environments in a much generalized manner. To strike a balance, Hybrid Applications embed the generic HTML5 or JavaScript apps inside Native Containers like accelerometer, camera, sound or GPS, combining the best of both; Native Features and Cross Platform adaptability & flexibility. PhoneGap is a revolutionary mobile application development framework based upon the open source Apache Cordova project for developing Hybrid Apps. It allows creation of mobile apps with HTML, CSS or JavaScript and then wraps them into the PhoneGap framework for deployment across platforms. PhoneGap Build is a cloud-based service built on top of the PhoneGap framework which allows building of the mobile apps in the cloud. These apps can then be installed as native mobile applications across multiple mobile device platforms smoothly. PhoneGap give the best of both the worlds, native and cross platform, broadening the horizons for diverse functionalities across various platforms, proving equally beneficial the developers and the business itself.
Why PhoneGap Speed of development and deployment is directly proportional to savings on time and cost. With PhoneGap, the applications need to be developed only once. These applications, including designs, user interfaces (UI) and the code itself is reused on a diverse platforms like iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows and Web. Truly out of the box thinking with all in one box!!