Thursday, November 10, 2011

PhoneGap under Incubation at Apache Foundation

When Adobe announced the acquisition of Nitobi, the creators of the nice cross-phonegaplogomobile  development tool, like many people I was worried that this would become a closed-source Adobe Air mobile. Adobe has recently been voicing that it would deprecate Flash mobile and instead move towards HTML5 and JavaScript. Thus, PhoneGap seemed like the perfect acquisition to make money out of the new generation of cross-platform mobile development.

The heart-warming announcement came a couple of days back when it was decided that PhoneGap was moved to Apache Foundation as an incubation project. The project is called Callback and the code has been moved to github for now. There are also some nice tools coming in Adobe Dreamweaver which can be used to work with PhoneGap and with the acquisition it might get better and better integrated. This means that Adobe will hope to make money out of the development and probably the build service, yet keep the platform open-source and free…

All in all, I think this is great movement for PhoneGap and cross-platform mobile development. What has been hard for ages since the promise of JavaME, seems more likely now. Good job Adobe!!