Thursday, March 28, 2024

Adobe PhoneGap 3.0 Released at 3rd Annual PhoneGap Day

7/19/13

Adobe® PhoneGap(tm), the popular open source mobile app development framework, released PhoneGap 3.0 today at the 3rd annual PhoneGap Day in Portland, Oregon. PhoneGap allows developers to build cross-platform mobile applications using HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript. With PhoneGap, you can re-use your existing web developer skills and use the PhoneGap API to gain access to native features that aren’t accessible in mobile browsers.

Major new features in PhoneGap 3.0 include:

  • New plugin architecture – Our plugin architecture keeps your app small and fast. You only include the APIs you need and plugins can be automatically installed and removed.
  • Better tools – We’ve made it easier to quickly shift between native platforms without learning new vocabularies by aligning the native platform CLI tooling. Don’t have a native platform SDK installed? No problem! Our tools now integrate with PhoneGap/Build.
  • New platforms – Earlier this year we welcomed support for iOS6 (with work on iOS7 happening now!), Windows Phone 8, and BlackBerry 10. Firefox OS and Ubuntu are coming soon.
  • New APIs – Welcome to two new APIs – InAppBrowser (formerly known as the ChildBrowser plugin) and Globalization API.

With the PhoneGap CLI, users will be able to directly install PhoneGap from the Node Package Manager (NPM). You no longer need to download a ZIP file every time PhoneGap has a new release. This is all part of our effort to improve user workflow and make the process lightning fast.

“PhoneGap 3 makes building for all the major mobile platforms a consistently smooth experience with the new CLI tools. I’m particularly excited to see what the community does with the new plugin infrastructure in the coming year. We’re committed to working with plugin developers to make sure the entire community ecosystem works well on the PhoneGap 3 bits.“ – Brian LeRoux

“PhoneGap 3 represents a significant step forward in authoring mobile apps using HTML, CSS, JavaScript. We couldn’t have done it without the support of all the committers at Apache Cordova and our partners at Intel, Google, Microsoft, Blackberry, IBM, and Mozilla.” – Andre Charland

Here is more information to get you on your way!

  • Getting Started Guides If you are new to PhoneGap, this is the ultimate resource for you. It has many guides for all of the platforms.
  • Upgrade Guides: If you are looking to upgrade your existing PhoneGap based projects, take a look at these guides.
  • PhoneGap CLI: The PhoneGap CLI is a command line tool to build, deploy and manage PhoneGap based applications and has PhoneGap Build integration. It uses the Cordova-CLI under the hood. Michael Brooks has a great post about getting started with the PhoneGap CLI on his blog.
  • Cordova CLI: The Cordova CLI is a command line tool to build, deploy and manage Cordova based applications. Make sure to read our Cordova CLI guide.
  • Plugman Usage Guide: This guide has instructions on how to install the core plugins into your project using Plugman. Users can see the repos where the core plugins now live.
  • PhoneGap 3.0 sample project with plugins: This is a sample PhoneGap project that comes with all of the plugins installed. It requires either Cordova CLI or PhoneGap CLI to be installed.
  • Plugin Development Guide: This guide covers the basics of developing a plugin for PhoneGap.

This blog was originally posted on Adobe’s PhoneGap blog here.

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