CODEWITHSUNDEEP
cordova
Mark
Mark

Reputation: 14930

PhoneGap and how it deploys

I have been asked to investigate PhoneGap and how it works. I can obviously see the main site and blogs about it, but none of them really seem to state "how" it works.

How does PhoneGap actually package up what you build in HTML/CSS/JavaScript into an app on your smartphone?

From what I can tell it bundles up all your calls into a custom web browser based on WebKit, which has custom hooks into the platform you are running on which you access via JavaScript API's. But this guess is pieced together from various old blogs and articles.

Is this correct? Are there any really good articles on this that I simply have missed?

Upvotes: 11

Views: 1453

Answers (2)

Scott Wilson
Scott Wilson

Reputation: 1660

PhoneGap uses an extended version of the W3C Widgets specification for packaging, metadata and configuration (e.g. which device APIs are needed), and then runs this within a device-specific browser wrapper pretty much as you describe. It enables access to native device capabilities by mapping JavaScript Device APIs (similar to W3C Device APIs but in the Phonegap namespace) onto native APIs.

I wrote a short post on this here:

http://scottbw.wordpress.com/2011/10/07/phonegap-and-widgets/

Upvotes: 4

Paul Beusterien
Paul Beusterien

Reputation: 29572

After the introduction, this PhoneGap for Engineers presentation provides some good PhoneGap nuts and bolts.

Upvotes: 8

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