PhoneGap Experiences

My first encounter and use of PhoneGap was an eye opener. The ability to produce a native app for my Android phone, AND other devices, just blew me away. Best of all, I didn't need to learn Objective-C, Java, or any other new language to produce these apps.

The apps are web apps. I'm not going to pretend you can do everything as easily in a web app as you can in native code; it certainly has a few down sides. But there is a lot that comes built in with web browsers, and you can lean on that functionality to build apps very quickly indeed.

I first started building these apps using the combination of Eclipse, JDK and ADK. Not having used any of these tools before, it was a learning curve, but not at all steep. See my post on Setting up PhoneGap for Android on Windows 7. The installation is the most arduous part of the development process.

Then along came PhoneGap Build which I loved from the start and I blogged about it in PhoneGap Build is amazing. Since then there have been a few things that have niggled me (hey, it's still in Beta you know!) and I've considered going back to my Eclipse builds.

One thing that might not be immediately obvious, is that you don't need to use PhoneGap (the library) to use their build server. Their build service simply builds your app regardless of which libraries you use. And for some (simple) apps, there is no need for PhoneGap. If your app doesn't need any device interaction, you can get by with a plain web page and JS functionality. This was a surprising realisation on my part when I wrote a simple lock game that only used a little JavaScript and some CSS animations.

The few things that niggle me with PhoneGap build are as follows (in no particular order):

• Seems to ignore which devices you want to build for and builds them all anyway. (The one I want is not first, so it bugs me.)
• The builds are quick, but not knowing how long they'll take, or when they'll start when they're queued is a little frustrating.
• There doesn't seem to be a way of defining a splash screen image. (Edit: it's actually very easy to define a splash screen in the configuration XML file.) There is a way to add a splash page when building with Eclipse.
• I've not found good documentation on the options and schema of the configuration XML file. Maybe I've not looked hard enough.

But I can ignore all of the above because of the reasons I explained in my post on how amazing it is. There's certainly a pleasure in knowing all you need is a web browser and internet access to get an app created and built. It does help to have Git installed locally and edit and test the files locally before pushing changes and rebuilding, but that's a simple install and low entry bar for what we can achieve with it.

One of the most desirable gaps that PhoneGap wasn't bridging for me personally, was the menu device button on Android. The latest release now includes support for all the device buttons. There were a few posts floating around the Internet on how to hack it into your app yourself (if you were on the Eclipse build path, no luck if you used PhoneGap build). But now that it's in the PhoneGap library, I think it has everything I need.

"I can wholeheartedly recommend PhoneGap as a library to bridge the device-JavaScript gaps."

I think PhoneGap is my library of choice for mobile apps. I have to admit that I've not tried any others - why would I? PhoneGap bridges all the device features I want and need, and then quite a few that I don't. I can wholeheartedly recommend it as a library to bridge the device-JavaScript gaps.

In terms of developing JavaScript web apps as native apps, there are issues that I've found troublesome but can be overcome. These are not as a result of using PhoneGap; they're a result of creating apps as browser based apps. Most commonly this boils down to layout issues, screen size limitations, and differences between the phone's browser and the Chrome browser I use on my desktop for development.