Preface

Over the past few years the web platform has made some remarkable progress, becoming more expressive than ever. The web platform continues to evolve thanks to the work of a passionate community of developers, designers and browser vendors.

Today, the web platform is the medium of choice for creative expression. Sophisticated applications are built with it, including email, mapping and document authoring applications. And the technology has sufficiently matured that it is now possible to build sophisticated mobile apps with it.

PhoneGap represents a great opportunity for entrepreneurs and established companies to use the power of the web platform to create mobile applications. With PhoneGap, HTML, CSS and JavaScript can be used to build sophisticated mobile apps on all the popular mobile platforms. In addition to all the great things that could be done in a web browser, you also get access to the APIs you need to interact directly with the hardware and the operating system, just like any other native app.

Many young entrepreneurs and startups are choosing PhoneGap as their development platform. Larger companies as well, including SAP, Zynga, Wikipedia and the BBC whose application for the recent Olympics games was built with PhoneGap.

I am excited by this new book that will help get you started with PhoneGap. Not only will it introduce you to the basics of using PhoneGap, but it also provides some helpful advice about the different frameworks to consider if you’re building a more complex app. A comprehensive review of the many APIs that PhoneGap offers to integrate with mobile devices will prove invaluable to write great apps that rival native apps. Some more advanced topics are covered as well, including writing plugins for PhoneGap.

The passion and enthusiasm of the authors on the subject will make this a pleasant reading for anyone interested in learning more about PhoneGap. I am very thankful for their efforts and I wish them success. Now grab this book, grab a keyboard, get coding, and create some amazing apps!

Arno, Senior Director, Web Platform & Authoring,Adobe