Nitobi and Microsoft have announced that the HTML5-powered PhoneGap cross-platform mobile application development framework now supports Windows Phone 7 “Mango” devices.
In a Sept. 8 blog post, Jesse Macfeyden, senior software engineer at Nitobi, the maker of PhoneGap, announced a new beta of PhoneGap for Windows Phone “Mango.” Macfeyden also said Nitobi has dedicated two developers to the project-himself and another engineer named Herm Wong. And Microsoft is lending engineering resources and technical support for the project.
“We’ve been busy dusting off our Silverlight+C# skills and implementing the other APIs,” he said.
In a separate Sept. 8 blog post, Jean-Christophe Cimetiere, a senior technical evangelist for interoperability at Microsoft, said, “We’re very excited to join Nitobi to announce availability of a PhoneGap beta supporting Windows Phone Mango. This new option to build applications targeting Windows Phone gives more choices to developers. In particular, Web developers will be able to easily leverage their HTML5 skills to target Windows Phone.”
The beta version of the PhoneGap libraries for Windows Phone 7 can be downloaded from https://github.com/phonegap/phonegap-wp7.
Describing PhoneGap, Cimetiere said:
““In case you’ve been so busy writing code for months and you’ve never heard about PhoneGap, it’s an open source mobile framework that enables developers to build applications targeting multiple platforms, by using standard web technologies (HTML5, CSS and JavaScript). On Windows Phone Mango PhoneGap leverages the new HTML5 support provided by IE9.”“
Cimetiere said the beta version includes most of the basic features, and includes JavaScript APIs to use Windows Phone Mango features like:
“– Access Device Information (UDDI and more)- Add and search Contacts- Connection status (network/WiFi connection status)- Alerts/Notification (alert and confirm)- Media Capture (Image and Audio)- Camera- Accelerometer- Geolocation“
APIs to come include file and storage APIs, Macfeyden said.
Macfeyden lauded Microsoft for its standards compliance efforts with Internet Explorer 9. “IE9 is a much more standards-compliant browser than previous IEs, and implements commonly used html5 features like DOMContentLoaded events, addEventListener interfaces, and CSS3,” he said. “Be sure to use to get the html5 implementation; otherwise the browser may fall back to a compatibility mode, and your code will likely choke and die.”