What is PhoneGap?

PhoneGap is an open-source mobile development framework originally created by Nitobi and was purchased by Adobe Systems in 2011. PhoneGap enables programmers to build cross-platform native mobile applications using JavaScript, HTML and CSS.

PhoneGap’s relation to Apache Cordova

In 2011, PhoneGap codebase was donated to Apache Software Foundation (ASF) as a project incubating at Apache. PhoneGap became a distribution of Apache Cordova under the Apache License, Version 2.0. This ensures PhoneGap’s proper stewardship, this can also help big organizations contribute to the development of the project with ease. With this, PhoneGap remains free and open-source. Those who wanted to be contributors of the project, this site is the place to look for.

For those who are still confused between PhoneGap and Apache Cordova may refer on the blog released by PhoneGap. This blog described Apache Cordova as the “engine that powers PhoneGap, similar as to how Webkit is the engine that powers Chrome and Safari”.

Supported Features

Mobile Devices

• iPhone/iPhone 3G
• iPhone 3GS and newer
• Android
• Blackberry OS 6.0+
• Blackberry 10
• Windows Phone 8
• Ubuntu
• Firefox OS

Last year, PhoneGap was able to make additional support for iOS:

1. iOS 8 and 64-bit support in the core and plugins
2. iPhone 6/6+ device support
3. Xcode 6 support in iOS-sim and iOS-deploy tools
4. WKWebView support (still in alpha-testing)

APIs

• Accelerometer
• Camera
• Compass
• Contacts
• File
• Geolocation
• Media
• Network
• Notification (Alert)
• Notification (Sound)
• Notification (Vibration)
• Storage

Awards

PhoneGap has been a popular tool among developers and has won various awards. It won the Dr. Dobb’s Jolt Awards in 2012 as the best mobile development tool. In the same year, PhoneGap also received the 2012 Technology of the Year Award from IDG’s InfoWorld Test Center. It also has been a constant winner in InfoWorld’s BOSSIE Awards from 2012 to 2014 under the Application Development Tools category.

Big companies such as Zynga, Facebook, Wikipedia, SAP, Untappd and Salesforce.com have been using PhoneGap for their mobile apps. For those who wants to know more and use PhoneGap, click here.

Jenkins is a cross-platform and an open source “extensible continuous integration” tool written in Java and created by Kohsuke Kawaguchi. Jenkins is licensed by MIT and had its first release in 2011. It is described as an application that monitors execution of repeated jobs. Currently, Jenkins is focused on the following jobs:

• Building/testing software projects continuously – with Jenkins’ so-called continuous integration system increases productivity by making changes made on projects now easier for developers and it’s also obtaining fresh build is now easier for users.
• Monitoring executions of externally-run jobs – examples are cron jobs and procmail jobs, even those that are run on a remote machine.

The following are the features offered by Jenkins:

1. Easy installation: No need for additional install or database.
2. Easy configuration: Configuration made easy using its web GUI with extensive error checks and inline help wherein configuration made easy.
3. Change set support
4. Permanent links
5. RSS/E-mail/IM Integration: can monitor build results
6. After-the-fact tagging of build
7. JUnit/TestNG test reporting: can produce tables, summary and display with history information of JUnit test reports.
8. Distributed builds/test loads to multiple computers
9. File fingerprinting: can also be used for tracking dependency.
10. Plugin Support

Jenkins is widely used by companies and organizations such as Dell, eBay, Facebook, GitHub, LinkedIn, Michelin, Netflix, Salesforce.com, Sony, Tumblr, Yahoo, and a lot more. It also has been popular and highly recommended by developers. Other open source projects like AngularJS, Apache, Bazaar, JRuby, Mozilla, OpenSUSE, and many more also use Jenkins. In 2014, it won various awards, from InfoWorld’s BOSSIE Awards under the application development tool category to ZeroTurnAround’s Geek Choice Award.

To learn how to use Jenkins click here or go to this link to get details on how to install and other information on its plugins.

Project Coin, started by Oracle’s Joseph Darcy in 2009, is a project that determined the “set of small language changes” that should be added to JDK 7 wherein final list of features where determined on the same year. The following are the Project Coin’s features that were added to JDK 7:

String in switch

This feature allows to switch string values, an ability similar to the existing switch on values of the primitive types.

Automatic Resource Management

Using the Automatic Resource Management statement, resources can be closed automatically.

Improved Type Interference for Generic Instance Creation (diamond)

The addition of limited type interference for class instance creation expression to the Java programming language will be addressed in this feature.

Simplified Varargs Method Invocation

This will lessen the confusion on the programmers by moving the warning from the call site to the method declaration.

An omnibus proposal for better integral literals.

Includes binary literals and underscores in numbers

Language support for Collections
Includes collection literals and indexing access for Lists and Maps.

Language support for JSR 292

Involves invokedynamic instructions, method handle invocation, certain relaxed conversions, and exotic identifiers.

Other proposed and selected features were submitted for reconsideration for JDK 8.

Furthermore, Project Coin was also being considered in the upcoming JDK 9. The JEP 213 also known as Milling Project Coin is included in the recent list of JEPs targeted to JDK 9. JEP 213 by Darcy started in May 2014, this proposes four small amendments to the Java Programming Language such as:

1. Allow @SafeVarargs on private instance methods. @SafeVarargs should be applied not only to static methods, final methods, and constructors but also to private methods.
2. Allow effectively-final variables to be used as resources in the try-with-resources statement. The use of final variables will avoid the need to declare dummy in using the try-with-resources statement.
3. Allow diamond with inner classes if the argument type of the inferred type is denotable.
4. Underscore from the set of legal indentifier names will be completely removed.

Click on the links to get updates and more information on the following: JEP 213 and JDK 9.