14 DAY TRIAL // Adobe is making good on its promise to bank on HTML5 as an alternative to its own Flash platform. It's been making some inroads so far, but has now announced that it's buying Nitobi Software, the company behind PhoneGap and PhoneGap Build.
These tools enable developers to quickly create HTML5 and JavaScript-based apps for mobile phones, regardless of the platform.
Of course, Adobe will continue to promote and use its own Flash platform for mobile devices that support it.
"PhoneGap has proven to be an industry-defining app solution for HTML5 developers," Danny Winokur, vice president and general manager for Platform at Adobe, wrote.
"PhoneGap is a fantastic solution for developing a broad range of mobile apps using the latest Web standards, and is already integrated with Dreamweaver CS5.5," he explained.
Adobe boasts that PhoneGap has already been downloaded 600,000 times. The open source tool has proven quite popular and is the base of many mobile apps available on several platforms.
The big appeal of the tool is its cross-platform capabilities. Since it uses standard web technologies, developers only have to write code once for all devices.
"It’s a perfect complement to Adobe’s broad family of developer solutions, including Adobe AIR, and will allow us to continue to provide content publishers and developers with the best, cutting-edge solutions for creating innovative applications across platforms and devices," Adobe boasted.
PhoneGap will remain open source and the code will be donated to the Apache Software Foundation. This will ensure that the project is supported and developed and that current contributors will continue to benefit. The name though will change.
On the other hand, PhoneGap Build, which contains some closed-source code, will remain with Adobe and will be how the company plans to monetize the technology.
PhoneGap Build is a cloud service which enables developers to convert their HTML5, JavaScript and CSS code into native code and package the app for the platforms they're targeting.