14 DAY TRIAL // A new solution is now available for those developers interested in the building of applications for the Symbian operating system. Courtesy of Nitobi, Symbian developers can now benefit from the PhoneGap solution, which was added to the Symbian Web Runtime only recently, and which offers enhanced support for software development.
Those who would benefit the most from the PhoneGap contribution to the Symbian Foundation are developers. PhoneGap is a framework that can be used by developers interested in coding in HTML and Javascript, who would have access to hardware like in the current smartphones. The PhoneGap APIs can be used as extensions for the Symbian Web Browser.
“Here at Nitobi we’re excited to be contributing PhoneGap to the Symbian Web Runtime. PhoneGap will now be included as part of the web extensions package in the Symbian^3 platform. By contributing code that converts PhoneGap APIs to the Symbian WRT API, we’ve made it easier for Symbian developers to write applications using PhoneGap. You no longer need to include any extra code which, of course, makes deployment faster,” Andre Charland states in a recent post on Nitobi's blog.
According to him, PhoneGap developers would also have a lot to gain, since they would benefit from enhanced support for the Symbian WRT platform. He also notes that PhoneGap comes with support for WRT 1.1, and that it implements a series of APIs, including geolocation, accelerometer, camera, vibration, contacts, SMS, sounds, orientation change and storage. Moreover, it seems that the company is currently working on the development of the network availability API.
“If you’re new to PhoneGap, it’s worth checking out. PhoneGap is an open source development framework for building cross-platform mobile apps that run on Symbian as well as iPhone/iTouch/iPad, Google Android, Palm and Blackberry. The PhoneGap open source code has been downloaded more than 250K times and there are thousands of PhoneGap apps in app stores and directories,” Charland concluded.