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 can be downloaded from: http://www.phonegap.com
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.
We have been in touch with André Charland and Brian Leroux (Co-Founders of Nitobi the creator of PhoneGap), who are seeing a growing interest from the PhoneGap developer community to target Windows Phone. So we’ve started working with Nitobi, helping to speed up the development of Windows Phone Mango support in PhoneGap by providing engineering resources and technical support.
The current beta version includes most of the basic features, and includes JavaScript APIs to use Windows Phone Mango features like:
- Access Device Information (UDDI and stuff)
- Add and search Contacts
- Connection status (network / wifi connection status)
- Alerts/Notification (alert and confirm)
- Media Capture (Image and Audio)
- Camera
- Accelerometer
- Geolocation
Here’s a screen shot of the PhoneGap Unit Test application running on the Windows Phone emulator:
I encourage you to read Nitobi’s blog post to get more details on how the whole process works.
This is the first step toward having full PhoneGap support for Windows Phone Mango. Stay tuned, we will provide updates and more extensive demos as progress is made. With Windows Phone Mango Released to Manufacturing and developer tools hitting “Release Candidate”, it’s the perfect time to start testing, give feedback and join the PhoneGap open source project.
Jean-Christophe Cimetiere, Sr. Technical Evangelist – Interoperability
@jccim – blogs.msdn.com/interoperability