PhoneGap - Mobile Development Made Easy

One of the presentations I couldn't miss at Codebits was Brian LeRoux talking about PhoneGap.

I had heard about PhoneGap, but nothing like watching a live presentation about it. :)



So, what's this PhoneGap from Nitobi? Well, it basically allows you to quickly and easily develop for a number of mobile devices.
Imagine your boss comes around and asks you to code an App to run, not only on an iPhone (that would already be an hurdle for most non-iPhone programmers) but also Android, Windows Mobile, Blackberry,  and Symbian?

Would you really be willing to waste a lot of time learning all those platforms? With PhoneGap you can easily develop your App using HTML and Javascript, and know that same single App will run on all those devices!
(For javascript they recommend XUI, which is quite compact and allows a better user experience on mobile devices.)

As mentioned by Brian right in the beginning of the talk, the objective of PhoneGap is to cease to be needed. Hopefully, as web standards evolve, all this stuff should be provided in a standardized way. Think of it just as an helper layer that allows you to do your work at this moment. (A bit like Google did when they launched Gears to allow offline use; something that now has been deprecated by HTML5 features.)

Until that happens, if you want to use geolocation, accelerometers, sound, vibration, and others... PhoneGap is the way to do it.



And if you need any help, be sure to check PhoneGap on Google Groups.