Moving Forward
Recently at PhoneGap Day EU we talked about how we are moving forward with PhoneGap and I wanted to share with those of you who couldn’t make it.
First, we need to talk about where PhoneGap came from. Back in 2008, a Vancouver based company called Nitobi created PhoneGap with the purpose of enabling users to create cross platform applications using web technologies.
The other main purpose of PhoneGap was to serve as a polyfill until browser vendors implemented the JavaScript API specifications that were laid out by the W3C. So here we are nine years later and PhoneGap still exists.
Back when we implemented the specifications as Apache Cordova and PhoneGap plugins we were specification compliant, but over time specifications change and we didn’t want to continually break developers code until the specifications solidified.
Unfortunately, that left us in a situation that can be best summed up by this amazing xkcd comic by Randall Munroe.
So now we’re are in a situation where there is one API in the browser and another API for Apache Cordova based applications, and that doesn’t sit right with us. Was it a mistake to implement these specifications before they were fully hardened? No, I don’t think so. Besides enabling a lot of users to create mobile applications the project was able to feed back valuable information to the W3C as to what worked and what didn’t work with some of the specifications.
Now we have embarked on an initiative to update all of the Apache Cordova and PhoneGap API’s to current W3C specifications. Please join us by commenting on the Core Plugin Audit Issue for Apache Cordova and creating issues on the PhoneGap PWA Plugin. We need your help to decide which plugins need to go away, which need to be updated, and which should be absorbed by the platform.
As to why we are taking this on? We believe that progressive web applications justify our long standing belief in the power of web technologies and fulfill a lot of the promise that PhoneGap initially set out to accomplish. We are committed to enabling developers to create amazing web applications, and when necessary, packaging them up to be deployed as mobile applications. Who knows maybe in the future desktop applications as well.
Help us, push the web forward…
