I work on a team that supports a mobile web site. It’s a typical web app in that it’s pages of forms that submit and retrieve data from a server. Back end currently JSF.
It’s working fine but there’s a strong want to start leveraging more of the native device’s components and features (namely messaging/alerts and UI widgets). Given the number of platforms we’re trying to support (iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Symbian [yuck] and potentially Windows 7) PhoneGap seems to be the first thing I should spend some time looking at.
I think I have a good grasp on how it works (broadly speaking) in that it allows you to use HTML CSS and JS then builds a native app that ‘wraps’ around your code and offers up a JS API into the device’s native widgets and features as needed.
What I’m not so clear on is how one would use it in a client/server type of interaction. Could we use PhoneGap to create a front end UI that would still talk live to our servers? If so, could we leverage standard AJAX/JSON/XML type technologies to send and receive the data or are there hidden hurdles I’m not aware of in doing that with a solution like PhoneGap? In otherwords, does the webview within the PhoneGap app work just as WebKit would in that we can make an AJAX call, get some data, and update the DOM?
Or is there a different type of framework I should be looking at?
A example summary explanation of what we’re looking for would be: We’d like our current web application to be able to launch a native date picker on the device and receive alerts but still interact with our servers as our current mobile web site does.
As user731077 says, yes, PhoneGap can do all of that. There’s a number of potential methods you could use to do so in the Javascript code of your PhoneGap app. Here’s a few to check out.
xui.js and zepto.js are my suggestions as they are basically stripped down versions of jQuery optimized for mobile web development. I’m partial to xui.js because its the framework commonly used by the PhoneGap guys themselves.