A WinPhone Dev Dude's Dive Into PhoneGap

 Windows Phone DZone - Pieter De Rycke - A Windows Phone Developer's Take on PhoneGap

"For a very long time I have avoided learning HTML and ASP.Net and stayed away of applications using it. I didn’t want to end up with messy code and hacks to support multiple browsers (read: Internet Explorer 6.0). But as HTML5 and CSS3 are gaining more momentum, I have changed my mind and I have started learning HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Even if these technologies have their annoyances, they are the way to develop cross platform software applications.

Recently there was a lot of buzz around PhoneGap. This a software framework that allows wrapping HTML5 applications into native applications for various mobile platforms (including iPhone, Android and Windows Phone). The idea of developing a mobile application for multiple platforms with a single code base is very tempting.

During the article I have still used the old name PhoneGap, but the framework has recently been open-sourced and renamed into Cordova (http://incubator.apache.org/projects/callback.html). Adobe will continue to offer a commercial version using the PhoneGap branding (http://phonegap.com/).

During the past days, I have developed a simple Todo Application using the following technologies:

• PhoneGap to wrap in into a native application.
• JQuery Mobile for the UI.
• HTML5 local storage to store the user data.

The applications consists of 6 screens and runs completely local; it does not require internet access to function. Theoretical it should be able to run on iPhone, Android and Windows Phone, but I was only able to test on a real Windows Phone device and on the desktop versions of Firefox, Safari and Chrome. So although it was not tested on multiple devices, I don’t expect a lot of issues when running it on IOS or Android.

..."

I've been thinking about PhoneGap/Cordova and thought this post had an interesting view.

One of these days I'm going to get a smart phone (No, I don't yet... I'm still on a semi-smart and have been waiting for a good WP7 Verizon phone... and waiting... and waiting... and... now I'll probably wait for a WP8 phone, assuming Verizon sells one... I'm almost about ready to jump carriers.. sigh) and so have been watching the mobile dev space. While I'll very likely jump to WP7/8, there's Android's in the house and I've been thinking about playing with some cloud based AFTF's (App's For The Family) and so would like something cross platform'ish and PhoneGap/Cordova seems like a good place to look at first...