Earlier I was reading an interesting article on androidandme.com written by Jeremiah Cohick who also runs digitaldandelion.com about developing Android apps written in standard web programming language that are then wrapped in a web to device wrapper and used to build Android apps quickly. His article used a combination of PhoneGap, the standard Android SDK and an IDE. PhoneGap is the go between of standard web scripts and the application itself. Imagine you write a website interface using html, css and javascript (including all those great javascript toolkits) then you import a base PhoneGap project into an Eclipse project for Android, make a few minor changes, add your web content and build. I make it sound easy, and it is meant to be.
Basically, PhoneGap provides an empty wrapper with all the necessary go between for your web script to become a full fledged Application as well as interact with function of the phone. This method of building applications is not unique to Android as it’s available in many flavors. Below is a list of supported phone features for various devices:
PhoneGap Supported Features
PhoneGap is not the only application that does this sort of thing. I have personally tested Titanium Developer as well, and it works in almost the exact same way.
With Titanium, you get native access to device features like geo-location, local file system / database, photos, and touch / accelerometer controls. Your apps look great because they use native UI elements, styling, transitions, and they run great because we compile Titanium to native code for peak performance.
They have very similar styles. It makes building somewhat simple applications very easy without having to learn a new language, however, it could mean you end up with a larger application with more memory usage than necessary as well as an application which may not run as fast as it would if it were scripted in the devices native SDK language. Basically, instead of working directly with the phone, it must go through an interpreter.
Titanium Developer Code Wrapper
But, if you don’t have a memory intensive application or you aren’t too concerned with speed to begin with, such as something like a basic feed reader or the like, then this may be a great method to use if you don’t want to learn a whole new language for a simple application. Also, you can write the application once and support multiple devices.
PhoneGap Base Application
There are a number of apps built with PhoneGap on their website. Try and few and see what they are like.
PhoneGap
Titanium Developer
androidandme
