Nitobi Updates Popular Mobile Development Framework

Nitobi, the maker of the popular PhoneGap mobile app development framework, has released PhoneGap 1.0.

Announced at the first-ever PhoneGap Day in Portland, Oregon, PhoneGap 1.0 focuses on accessing native device APIs, which is new ground for the web. Other improvements include overall API stability and “pluggable” architecture, World Wide Consortium Device APIs and Policy (DAP) API compatibility, a contacts API and debugging tools.

Native mobile application development

PhoneGap, an HTML5 platform, enables developers to use foundation web technology such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript to create native mobile applications. Using PhoneGap, developers can write their app once and deploy it to six major mobile platforms and app stores including iOS, Android, BlackBerry, webOS, Bada and Symbian. PhoneGap has been popular among mobile app developers, including developers at Fortune 500 companies such as IBM, which also has contributed to the platform. The open source code is downloaded approximately 40,000 times every month, more than 600,000 times in total.

The 1.0 release of PhoneGap also features a new unifying bridge interface that makes adding platforms and platform extensions easier. Additionally, the plug-in development process has been simplified.

“Most of these new enhancements come from our community,” said Brian LeRoux, senior software engineer at Nitobi and PhoneGap evangelist, in a statement. “For instance, PhoneGap developers were calling for a consistent way to make plug-ins that would run on all major smartphone platforms and this release does that.”

“The community built up around PhoneGap is its greatest asset,” says Nitobi chief executive Andre Charland. “The PhoneGap community identifies common pain points and works together to overcome them.” Contributors include Nitobi, hundreds of individual developers and a team of senior software engineers at IBM whose commitment and contributions to PhoneGap development has been a major benefit to the community.

IBM is not the only Fortune 500 to show interest in PhoneGap. Earlier this year, Adobe integrated PhoneGap into Dreamweaver so that developers can package apps with PhoneGap and launch iOS and Android emulators directly from within Dreamweaver. Other companies to embrace PhoneGap and its cross-platform philosophy include Alcatel-Lucent, Sabre, Cisco, Logitech and Time Warner.