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Worklight mobile app platform and tools complement the PhoneGap development framework for smartphone and tablet applications

New York, NY and Vancouver, BC – July 13, 2011 – Worklight, the leading HTML5, hybrid and native platform and tools for smartphone and tablet applications, and Nitobi, creator of the popular PhoneGap, the only open source mobile framework that supports six platforms, today announced that technologies from the two companies now offer enhanced integration to enable mobile apps for enterprises.

“Companies launching mobile apps are constantly looking for ways to reach more devices while avoiding increased overhead,” said Shahar Kaminitz, CEO at Worklight. “PhoneGap reduces much of the complexity of cross-platform development, while we complement with additional tools, integration, security and management capabilities. Our joint mobile solutions are an excellent fit for enterprises looking to take advantage of HTML5.”

PhoneGap, created by Nitobi, is an open source development tool for building fast, easy, cross-platform mobile apps with HTML and JavaScript that take advantage of core native device features. Since 2008, the open source framework has been downloaded more than 500,000 times and thousands of apps built using PhoneGap are available in mobile app stores and directories.

Worklight’s mobile app platform and tools provide an enterprise-grade solution that enables organizations to efficiently develop and deliver HTML5, hybrid and native smartphone and tablet applications. The Worklight Studio, Worklight Server, Worklight Console and Device Runtime Components provide a flexible and powerful IDE, mobile middleware, security and management.

“There is an immediate need in the enterprise not only to overcome cross-platform app development challenges but also streamline backend connectivity, security and meet additional IT requirements for mobile infrastructure,” said Andre Charland, CEO of Nitobi. “We’re pleased that Worklight is using PhoneGap to help their customers and further enterprise adoption in the enterprise.”

Worklight is a leading commercial mobile application platform that incorporates PhoneGap as part of its core technology. The company is a member of the PhoneGap community and will continue do make contributions to the project.
To learn more, please visit http://www.worklight.com/phonegap.

About Nitobi
Nitobi is the creator of PhoneGap (www.phonegap.com) an open source development tool for building fast, easy, cross-platform mobile apps with HTML and JavaScript that take advantage of core features in the iPhone, Google Android, Palm, Symbian and BlackBerry SDKs. The open source code has been downloaded more than 500,000 times and thousands of apps built using PhoneGap are available in mobile app stores and directories.

About Worklight
Worklight provides open, complete and advanced mobile application platform and tools software for smartphones and tablets. Our award-winning products help organizations of all sizes to efficiently develop and deliver HTML5, hybrid and native applications with a powerful and flexible mobile IDE, next-generation mobile middleware, end-to-end security and integrated management and analytics. Worklight dramatically reduces time to market, cost and complexity while enabling better customer and employee user experiences across more devices. For more info, visit www.worklight.com.

So I have decided to make a series of getting started screencasts helping people setup their environment for developing phonegap apps for specific platforms and making a quick hello world app or loading up the sample app. I was hoping to get some feedback on if you find these screencasts useful, how to improve on them, if you want more and what I should discuss in future screencasts.

I recommend watching these videos in 720p.

iPhone

Android

webOS

BlackBerry Widgets

Last week I heard about Palm’s new hot app promotion. It is pretty much an incentive to developers to make palm apps, have them get ranked and get some easy money (find details here). I realized that a lot of PhoneGap developers seem to just develop for the iPhone and android and I wanted show how easy it is to convert that iPhone PhoneGap app to a palm PhoneGap app.

The app which I am converting is called Snow Reports. You can download the source from my github at http://github.com/stevengill/SnowReports. You will see that I already have a working version of the app for iPhone, android, and palm. I have made three screen casts walking through converting the iPhone version to the Palm version.

Screen Cast!

Set Up

Once you have followed the getting started guide for palm on the phonegap wiki, you should have your system setup and ready to make the palm version of this app. Make sure you download the latest version of phonegap-palm from github here. We want to copy over the contents from the www folder in the iphone repository into the phonegap-palm/framework/www folder.

Changes I Made

There were very few changes I had to make to get this working perfectly on the palm emulator. The ultimate goal of PhoneGap is to have the user never need to make changes to the source but the PhoneGap team hasn’t started focusing on rendering issues yet so until then we will have to make a few css tweaks.

For index.html, first thing that all Palm applications need is the mojo library.
<script src="/usr/palm/frameworks/mojo/mojo.js" type="text/javascript" x-mojo-version="1" ></script>

You will also notice that in the meta viewport tag that height is set to 460px. This is set for the iPhone and takes into account header in the webview. With palm we can have varying heights of devices so I usually set this to device-height.
<meta name = "viewport" content = "width = device-width, height = device-height">

For snowreport.css, some of the styles that looked good on the iPhone will not render over so good on the Palm emulator. Here are a the two styles I changed to make it look pretty:

.header div, .footer div {
height: 34px;
padding-top: 8px;
background-repeat: repeat-x;
float: left;
}


.footer .mid-blue, .footer .mid-black {
padding: 8px 9px 0px;
}


Some Cleaning Up

There are a few things left over to do before I can call this app complete:

• I want to copy Icon.png from the iphone/SnowReports to phonegap-palm/framework/www directory.
• Then I want to change the id of my app. Open up appinfo.json file located in phonegap-palm/framework/www and edit the id. In my screencast I chose com.palm.snowreports. In reality you probably want to name this something different. If you leave it as com.palm.* it might not get accepted by the palm store due to them thinking you are trying trick the store into saying that palm made the app. The reason why it is set to that by default is because there is a bug in webOS that requires you to have com.palm if you want vibration in your apps. Palm is currently looking into this and will hopefully release a fix soon. Your best bet as a developer is not to include vibration for the moment and change this id to something unique.

After you have changed the Id and have the emulator running, in the terminal you will need to do a make, palm-install com.palm.snowreports, and palm-launch com.palm.snowreports.

There you have it. That’s how simple it is to convert your iPhone PhoneGap app to a Palm PhoneGap app and ready to submit to the Palm webOS app store. Get to it developers!