PhoneGap now supports all native functionality on Windows Phone 7 being on par with iOS and Android.
Microsoft got involved in helping Nitobi to port PhoneGap to Windows Phone Mango in July, and a working version of the framework was announced in September. Many native features worked, including Accelerometer, Camera, Contacts, Geolocation, Notification, MediaCapture, but the team expected some bug to surface. Also, the Compass was not tested due to lacking a WP7 device having such functionality. And two important pieces of the API were missing at that time: File and Storage.
Recently, the PhoneGap team and Microsoft announced version 1.3, having some enhancements for iOS, Android, and RIM, along with a ready-for-production feature set for WP7, including full API support, better Visual Studio templates, documentation, guides, bug fixes and a number of plug-ins:
- Facebook Connect – API for interacting with Facebook
- ChildBrowser – displaying an external web page without leaving the application
- PGSocialShare – publishing the status on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Windows Live
- PGMapLauncher – getting driving directions
- LiveTiles – interacting with live tiles
A small team of developers managed to bring PhoneGap to WP7 in less than 6 months. Jesse MacFadyen, development lead, told the story of working with Microsoft’s mobile OS, sharing his impressions, largely positive. The porting progressed so swiftly due to the extensive support that IE9 has for HTML5.
PhoneGap was renamed Callback when it became an Apache Incubator project, and the plan is to rename it once again to Cordova when version 1.4 is to be released.
