PhoneGap - Overview

Mobile, handhelds and easy-to-carry devices have started a new revolution in software engineering. These small but efficient devices are capable to run applications created with high-end programming languages. People who own these devices tend to use them at their maximum as these devices such as mobile phones, are very convenient to use anytime, anywhere.

The architecture of a mobile device is similar to that of a computer system. It has custom built hardware, firmware, and operating systems.

These three items are mostly proprietary and are engineered, developed, and assembled under one flagship organization. Apps (Application Software) are developed both by flagship organization and developers from outside the organization.

A number of well-recognized mobile operating systems are available in the market in both proprietary and open-source categories. Most widely used mobile operating systems are −

• Android
• IOS
• BlackBerry
• Windows

Every mobile operating system provides their own set of tools and environments to develop apps that will run on them. Application made for one operating system cannot run on any other platform as they are entirely different. Developers tend to cover all major mobile operating systems in order to increase reachability among their users.

Thus it becomes a tedious task to develop an application program that may run on all major OS platforms, keeping its look, feel, and functionality identical on all platforms. For this work, a developer needs to understand all platforms and should have a good understanding of major development tools for different operating systems.

PhoneGap

PhoneGap may be seen as a solution to all problems mentioned above. PhoneGap is a framework that makes the developers develop their apps using standard web APIs for all major mobile operating systems. It is open-source and free.

Developers only need to know web development using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. PhoneGap takes care of rest of the work, such as look and feel of the app and portability among various mobile operating systems.

Using PhoneGap, one can create apps for all major mobile operating systems like Apple iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows etc. This does not require the developer to have an expertise over any of the above mentioned platforms, neither the developer is required to know programming to code the app from scratch.

PhoneGap allows its users to upload the data contents on website and it automatically converts it to various App files.

In this tutorial, we shall see how to create an app for Apple, android, and windows platform online without using any offline tool.