Tag Archives: PhoneGap

Feb 8

Wine Cellar Mobile Starter Application with PhoneGap and Backbone.js

I ran across a great wine cellar management mobile app, created by Christophe Coenraets (@ccoenraets), a Technical Evangelist for Adobe.

His mobile app is a great walk through, showing you the power of building a cross platform mobile application using PhoneGap.

He builds the wine cellar management application using:

  • PhoneGap – An open source platform that allows you develop cross-platform Mobile applications using HTML and JavaScript. Specifically, it allows you to:
    • Package an HTML application as a native app on all the key mobile platforms (iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone, WebOS, Symbian, Bada).
    • Access your device capabilities (Camera, GPS, database, accelerometer, etc) using a cross-platform JavaScript API.
  • Backbone.js – A framework to give structure to your web application regardless of where it is running: in a traditional Web Browser, or as an app packaged with PhoneGap.

His implementation is a simple consumer application, allowing you to look for wines in your Wine Cellar, meant to be a tutorial demonstrating how to create, update, delete items in a mobile app–a great how-to, that you can apply to almost anything a user would collect.

He has posted the source code for the mobile application to a GitHub repository, complete with an iOS, Xcode project, and an Android Eclipse project.

I like finding starter kits like this that walk developers through building web and mobile applications. I’m building some of these here at CityGrid, and I will post my projects as well as other cool ones like Christophe Coenraets, here on the blog when find them.

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Code / Mobile

Jan 26

Build Mobile Apps with HTML and Deploy to iOS, Android, Windows and Blackberry

I had the pleasure to hearing PhoneGap talk at the Facebook Mobile Hack in New York City and Boston last week.  Both of the events started with workshops from Facebook team members around core concepts, and advanced topics of the Facebook platform.  After the Facebook team presented, they invited up a representative from the open-source mobile platform PhoneGap.

PhoneGap allows developers to build HTML5 mobile applications using an open-source framework, and deploy as mobile web app, as well as iOS, Android, Windows and Blackberry platforms.  PhoneGap provides the best of both worlds while building using web-standards, and also opening up access to many native mobile APIs.

Some of the best things PhoneGap can provide to developers are:

  • Take advantage of HTML5 and CSS3
  • Use JavaScript to write your code
  • Access Native Features
  • Deploy your app to Multiple Platforms
  • Take advantage of PhoneGap Build
  • Add PhoneGap Plugins to your project
  • Use Tools from the community
  • Get help from the growing Community

PhoneGap is the best attempt out there I’ve seen that alleviates the problems developers face when building  applications for multiple device–iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, using different frameworks and languages. PhoneGap is using standards-based web technologies, to bridge web applications and mobile devices, eliminating the gaps between the big platform players.

You may notice that Adobe acquired the company, Nitobi, that produced PhoneGap, but Adobe states its commited to keeping PhoneGap open and driven by the community, which includes contributors like IBM, RIM and Microsoft.  To do this PhoneGap was contributed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under the name Apache Callback in October 2011. It is currently under incubation until it can become a full Apache project, allowing it to remain free and open source under the Apache License, Version 2.0.

I’ve heard about PhoneGap for some time now, but haven’t had enough time to dive in.  I will be adding it to the list of tools I showcase and dive deeper into here at CityGrid.  I hope to leverage the PhoneGap platform and build code samples and prototypes that developers scan use to be build local mobile applications using CityGrid Places, Reviews, Offers and Mobile Advertising APIs.

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HTML5 / Mobile