Gifford Matt - PhoneGap Mobile Application Development Cookbook

In the summer of 2007, Steve Jobs changed the world by releasing the iPhone and boldly declared the future was web-based applications. A short year later, the story changed, but the vision remained. At this time I was working as "acting CTO" for a very small web consultancy called Nitobi (we gave ourselves joke titles and mine was actually SPACELORD!1!!). The iPhone SDK, not yet called iOS SDK, was just released and a few of my colleagues found themselves at Adobe in San Francisco for the iPhone Dev Camp. They arrived with the ambiguous idea to discover if it actually was possible to realize web technology for app development. Rob Ellis, Brock Whitten, and Eric Osterly succeeded in bridging the UIWebView to make native calls, and the first implementation of PhoneGap was born. A very short time later, Joe Bowser built an Android implementation. Dave Johnson, Nitobi's "real CTO", followed quickly with the BlackBerry implementation. Herein, PhoneGap got real. And then, less than a year from the first commits, in the spring of 2009, I found myself giving one of the first PhoneGap presentations at the first JSConf, and despite me being terribly scared, people loved it.

Perhaps developers only loved the meme and the expletive-heavy presentation style I relied on to mask my terror. But perhaps developers really loved being treated like cohorts in a bigger plan, and respected by a technology instead of being locked into another proprietary ghetto.

We were, and still are, web developers with a strong bias for composing our own stacks from open source code. We want to be writing web apps, with technology of our choosing, and not paying for the right to do so. We didn't want a PhoneGap to exist, and so it is the goal of the project to see this thing through to obsolescence. This work continues under the stewardship of the Apache Software foundation under the name Apache Cordova. Defining our vision, and planning our execution to our end has been my primary role in the project since inception, in addition to meme, and expletive, heavy presentations.

Today PhoneGap is a robust, mature, well-tested, and a regularly released software project. There are 30 full-time core committers with us at Apache from a range of sponsoring organizations, and many hundreds more pitching in every day. All major operating systems are supported, our docs are comprehensive, the CLI tooling makes common mobile dev workflows trivial, the APIs cover all the common device capabilities, and we have a well documented plugin interface for extending beyond the browser.

Matt Gifford has been a long time supporter and hacker of PhoneGap, and his book brings his hard-won experience back to you. In this text you will find the specific areas you need to tackle, be it accessing the device sensors (such as geolocation) or the system data (such as the filesystem or perhaps the phone contacts). You will have a handy reference for dealing with rich media such as images, audio, and video.

Writing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript can be daunting and Matt has thankfully given you two great options to get started with, they are, XUI and jQuery Mobile. Finally, when you need to take your app beyond default PhoneGap and expose native capability you can learn all about the PhoneGap Plugin API.

Building applications for mobile devices is hard work but using PhoneGap makes that job a whole lot easier, and more portable to the inevitable future web. Matt's book will help you get there now. Have fun, and if you need any help at all, don't hesitate to find me (or Matt) online.

Brian Leroux ,

Senior Product Manager, PhoneGap Lead

and SPACELORD!1!!, Adobe Systems Ltd