Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Cross-platform mobile development: PhoneGap + Enyo



If you want to develop a mobile application, but don't want to have to rewrite it for every platform you want to develop for (Android, iOS, etc.), PhoneGap is what you want. It allows you to develop applications using web technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript), and then deploy them to a large number of platforms, such as Android and iOS. It has APIs that let you interface directly with the mobile device's hardware (camera, GPS, accelerometer, you name it). It's even been approved by Apple, and we all know what a feat that is ;)

Undoubtedly you'll want a nice framework that gives you all the UI widgets you're used to: layouts, spinners, popups, progress bars, etc. That's where Enyo comes in. Enyo was actually the JavaScript framework that was part of WebOS. Since WebOS has been open-sourced, so has Enyo. I would recommend Enyo over other JavaScript frameworks like jQuery Mobile and Sencha; see here for some reasons why: Enyo+PhoneGap Vs jQueryMobile+PhoneGap

There are already some apps out there using this approach. Here are a couple for android:
I've even done some playing around with phonegap and the enyo samples myself. I put it in github in case it's of any interest:
https://github.com/bmaupin/junkpile/tree/master/java/testing/android-phonegap-enyo-test

The screenshots in this post are from that code, and you can see more here:
https://github.com/bmaupin/junkpile/tree/master/java/testing/android-phonegap-enyo-test/screenshots

Enjoy!

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