Phonegap

Phonegap is a mobile app framework which supports multiple mobile platforms (iOS, Android, Symbian, etc.). We can develop phonegap mobile app using HTML + CSS + JS. Phonegap will convert the app into native application.

You can download the latest Phonegap framework from Phonegap website.

I developed a phonegap mobile app for Android, so this post will be related with how I used Phonegap to implement an Android app.

You will get the instruction to set up Phonegap for Android application from this link. This will make you capable of atleast creating a 'Hello world' application for Android using phonegap.

So we can use HTML, CSS and JS for developing a phonegap android app. But which JS framework we'll use, Jquery? Then there is an issue - jQuery is developed for the web app, it will be too heavy for a mobile app. So I used a lighweight JS framework called XUI JS framework.

There are many other JS frameworks for mobile apps. Take a look at those JS Frameworks which Phonegap supports.

Phonegap gives access to use many mobile features like vibrator, accelero meter, contacts, etc. Phonegap have a good API for those featutres. I implemented two features from this API:

1. Vibrator:
• navigator.notification.vibrate(100);
• This will provide a vibration of 100 milli seconds.
2. Notification:
• navigator.notification.activityStart();
• This will show a dialog box with the 'Please wait' message.
• navigator.notification.activityStop();
• This will hide the dialog box.