Chapter 1. PhoneGap and Enterprise Mobility

The enterprise has always focused on providing solutions that enable its users to access important data in a variety of ways. With smartphones being the norm, the enterprise can leverage the mobility of its users and deliver real-time data in a timely fashion. Of course, the smartphone environment is a quickly changing and rapidly evolving environment; as such, solutions need to be equally agile.

PhoneGap/Cordova is a framework that enables the enterprise to target multiple smartphone platforms with a single code base using technologies the enterprise is already largely familiar with. It's a perfect fit for the enterprise, as it doesn't require duplication of effort to build multiple native applications that must essentially be rewritten for each supported platform. Users like choice in their mobile devices, and PhoneGap/Cordova allows the enterprise to offer just that.

Furthermore, since PhoneGap/Cordova provides developers with access to the native features of the user's mobile device, it also provides the necessary technologies to interact with the enterprise's systems over a variety of networks. This means that users can be highly mobile without losing access to highly valuable and timely enterprise data.

It is this ability of PhoneGap/Cordova to display both content using web-based technologies, and interface with the mobile device using native technologies that gives rise to the term hybrid. This simply means that PhoneGap/Cordova apps are neither purely web-based (as a web app would be), nor are they purely native-based (as a native iOS app would be); they are a blend of the two. This allows PhoneGap/Cordova apps to be written using technologies already established within the enterprise while also allowing immense flexibility.

In this chapter, we'll cover the following sections:

• Some history behind PhoneGap/Cordova
• Reasons why it makes perfect sense in an enterprise development
• How PhoneGap/Cordova enables fast cross-platform development
• The application structure and the technology stack

  Note

  Throughout this book, we'll often use the term "Cordova" to refer to both PhoneGap and Cordova. PhoneGap is a distribution of Cordova and is very similar to Cordova. Where there are differences, this book will mention them separately by name.

This book assumes that the reader has a good working knowledge of PhoneGap/Cordova from a personal perspective, and is also someone who is now tasked with taking that knowledge into the enterprise. As such, we won't cover the installation of PhoneGap/Cordova, neither will we cover the installation of native platform SDKs.