With the increase of internet use on mobile, most of the Companies are shifting their focus towards Mobile Development. When shifting towards mobile development, we initially faced two major challenges:
- Developing the Mobile application that has the ability to support multiple mobile platforms
- Ability to build the app as soon as possible
Our main platforms for development are iPhone and Android.
Both required apps to be built in their native languages that is Objective C and Java whereas we were looking to build something quick and compatible for both. We decided to build apps in HTML 5 and JavaScript, but this again required some build in framework that provides us with easy phone integration and at the same time allows us to fetch phone properties like identifying the phone, users geo location, and so on. We looked into some of the available frameworks . Started exploring and testing. We realized that each framework has its own limitation and dependency. After exploring quite a few, we chose to use PhoneGap for building apps.
PhoneGap is an open source development tool/framework for building fast, easy mobile apps using HTML5,CSS, JavaScript. The advantage lies in the fact that one time written code can be run on different devices. It has core library which provides a number of functionalities for device application development.
PhoneGap uses standards-based web technologies to bridge web applications and mobile devices. It facilitates hybrid application development, the web and native application development. PhoneGap is an open-source, cross-platform mobile application framework for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Symbian, Palm OS. It supports internal Database that can save user data and contents.
It has been challenging and fun working on some of the projects. HTML 5 and Javascript allows us to build the apps very quickly and PhoneGap helps us with the actual phone integration. We now have the expertise in accessing some of the advance d features like users album, user geo location, using phone camera etc and then uploading the same to an online website.
