PhoneGap is for sure a good solution for some developers allthough some of the apps they feature on their website are really just shells around existing web sites. I have the Wikipedia app on my phone and it is written with PhoneGap. It works, but is quite slow for what is really a very simple app on top of a website.
But PhoneGap is mobile only, I need cross-platform desktop support as well and I am not interested in a solution that deploys to one runtime on mobile and a totally different runtime on the desktop because that to me is a recipe for increased testing/QA/support/bug workarounds etc and I'll avoid that above all else. Really, what I want is desktop quality apps seamlessly deployed via the web. AIR does this pretty darn well, Flash player even better if you are willing to sacrifice a few desktop related features. But those are my needs/priorities, others have different ones. On 21.11.2012, at 09:39, Alain Ekambi wrote: > Now not every company build apps at the scale of FaceBook. > For most of the case HTML5 mobile apps + PhoneGap(Cordova) are pretty good. > > > 2012/11/21 Hordur Thordarson <hor...@lausn.is> > >> On 20.11.2012, at 22:14, Kevin Newman wrote: >> >>> Mark Zuckerberg also said very publicly that Facebook "burned" (his >> word) 2 years of development with HTML5, "We burned two years. That's >> really painful. Probably we will look back saying that is one of the >> *biggest mistakes* if not *the biggest strategic mistake* that we made." It >> was less of a "cave" and more of a fundamental shift in understanding (and >> a correct one). >> >> Agreed and that's really what I ment by "caved in", they just realized it >> was never going to be as good as a native app. The problem with HTML5/JS >> as an app mechanism is that it just wasn't designed for that. Some changes >> have been made to it in order to make it easier to write applications (as >> opposed to web sites which is a totally different thing) but it really >> isn't very good for that at all except maybe for small apps. The JavaFX >> crowd is having the exact same discussion the Flex crowd is, except pretty >> much no one in the JavaFX crowd wants to deploy to HTML/JS. They want >> JavaFX runtimes for mobile so that they can have one set of code and the >> same or very similar runtime everywhere (sound familiar ?). And the >> community is actually working towards a solution that gives them that. But >> Oracle, like Adobe, seems to have given into the "HTML5 for everything" >> rhetoric so they are at least currently not backing this. >> >>> >>> This is where Adobe has an opportunity with AIR, that they seem intent >> on failing to capitalize on (at least in their marketing narratives, and >> the signals the decision makers are sending out into the market place - the >> Flash engineers are doing pretty cool stuff with stage3D and whatnot). >> >> Yep, very frustrating that Adobe gave up on this vision because they had >> by far the strongest dev/deployment story out there with almost the best of >> everything. with Flash player or AIR for the desktop and AIR for mobile and >> almost single source for all the platforms (UI tweaks/diffs for >> phones/tablets obviously). This is of course still possible, we just don't >> know how long it is going to last :-( But while it works, I hope Apache >> Flex will continue to be maintained/improved in it's current shape. >> >>> >>> Anyway, Apache Flex doesn't need to wait for Adobe's higher-ups to >> figure it out - Flex can go HaXe, and have a multi-platform ubiquity story >> and an open source story to boot. >> >> Sure. I have to say though that my clients don't really care if the tools >> I use are open source or not or whether the language I write in is >> ActionScript or Haxe or smth else. They care about functionality, >> usability, cross-platformness and ease of deployment/updating of the >> resulting product, and they also want development to cost as little as >> possible, hence the less problems I have during dev and the less testing I >> have to do in multiple browsers or with multiple runtimes, the better. >> >>> >>> Kevin N. >>> >>> >>> On 11/17/12 5:25 AM, Hordur Thordarson wrote: >>>> Eventually FB caved in and created a fully native app. >>> >> >>
