Chapter 1
Introducing PhoneGap
WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER:
- Using PhoneGap to build an application
- Exploring the history of PhoneGap
- Exploring what you can build with PhoneGap
- Understanding the basics of a PhoneGap application
Welcome to PhoneGap! You’re reading this book because you’ve probably heard about PhoneGap, and want to learn more about how you can use it to build cross-platform mobile applications. This book delves into different parts of the PhoneGap API, and teaches you how to use the PhoneGap tools to build different applications.
Before getting into the nitty-gritty details, though, it’s time to get a 10,000-foot overview of PhoneGap and what it can do. In this chapter, you learn about the basics of using PhoneGap, as well as a bit of the history of PhoneGap. By the end of this chapter, you will be familiar with the basics of building a PhoneGap application.
USING PHONEGAP
As you can see in Figure 1-1, according to PhoneGap’s website (www.phonegap.com), PhoneGap is an “HTML5 app platform that allows you to author native applications with web technologies.”
FIGURE 1-1: The homepage of the PhoneGap website
As a developer, you’ll be using PhoneGap to develop working code for iPhones, Androids, BlackBerries, and webOS devices. In each case, you’ll be using a PhoneGap wrapper that contains your web-based HTML, cascading style sheet (CSS), and JavaScript code. ...
