Hey folks, recently I got an opportunity to create a mobile application. Now a days there are so many platforms available like the iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and so on. These are some of the most common and famous platforms. Earlier, people who wanted to develop any app for these platforms need to learn and understand the platform's API, its programming languages, and so on. But this learning process was surely time consuming. This is where PhoneGap comes for the rescue.

PhoneGap makes it easy for us to develop a hybrid/platform independent app and hence reduces the time consuming learning process. We can still develop a platform specific mobile app using PhoneGap, but if we intend to develop a platform specific mobile app, then developing directly using that specific platform's API and language would be more feasible. But on the other hand, I think PhoneGap is an amazing technology, since it allows us to develop platform independent (as I mentioned above) and such apps can be developed quite easily using HTML5, CSS and JavaScript. That's it!!!

Friends, honestly I am not an expert in developing mobile apps using PhoneGap. I am still learning this technology and I am writing this article just because I want to share my experience and things that I learn. So if there are any mistakes in the content then please notify me with your comments. I'll definitely rectify it.In this article I am going to write a few basic things what I have learned and will continue writing few more posts as I move ahead. So here in this article I am just going to tell you about its history and the advantages / dis-advantages of using PhoneGap.

1. History of PhoneGap

  • PhoneGap was first created in the year 2008 at the "iPhone Dev Camp" in San Francisco.
  • The final first version (v 1.0) of PhoneGap was released in the year 2011. So you see, then this technology is still quite new for us.
  • PhoneGap was originally developed/created by a company called "Nitobi" and this company started it as an Open Source Project.
  • Later, Adobe acquired Nitobi and the project was handed over to Apache Software Foundations.
  • So now you see, PhoneGap is basically an Apache Open Source project and is called "Apache Cordova".

2. Some Advantages of PhoneGap

  • The major advantage of using PhoneGap is that, it is Platform Independent.
  • As mentioned in point 1, learning platform specific API's and languages would be tedious and time consuming.
  • Through PhoneGap, we can simply develop mobile apps using HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
  • Through PhoneGap, we can write our code once and can be compiled and deployed over a vast number of platforms.

3. Some disadvantages of PhoneGap

  • PhoneGap might make your app work a bit slow. Basically here I am trying to refer to those apps that are more dependent on the hardware of the mobile.
  • The look and feel of the mobile app created by using PhoneGap might not be the same as the platform specific mobile app.

Alright friends, so that's it for now. In my next article, I will try to explain how to install PhoneGap and we'll try to create a very simple "Hello World" mobile app using PhoneGap. Please feel free to post your comments. Thank you!!!