iPhone and Android developers will be happy about Symbian’s announcement today that it will integrate Nitobi’s PhoneGap with its Symbian platform web extensions package. This move will make it easier for developers to create HTML, CSS and JavaScript applications for a wider range of mobile devices.
PhoneGap wraps web applications inside native code–in the iPhone’s case, Objective-C and Cocoa–so developers are spared the process of learning the device-specific programming languages. This has the advantage of enabling developers to utilize native phone features including GPS, SQLite database, camera and contacts while using their current skillsets. PhoneGap also targets the Blackberry, Palm and Nokia’s Ovi along with Android and the iPhone.
Lee Williams, Symbian Foundation’s executive director, announced at the O’Reilly Open-Source Convention in Portland that he believes the agreement with PhoneGap will “allow developers on other platforms to quickly build rich internet-based apps for Symbian.”