PhoneGap 3.0

PhoneGap 3.0 was released at PhoneGap day in Portland, OR last week. There are some great changes with this new release. Historically PhoneGap and Cordova, the open source project behind PhoneGap, were almost identical. This has changed with the release of 3.0.

Prior to 3.0, PhoneGap was distributed as an archive which was downloaded and unzipped to install. Now, both PhoneGap and Cordova are distributed as command line tools, which are installed via the node.js package manager, npm. Both Cordova and PhoneGap can be installed on your machine at the same time.

$ npm install phonegap -g
$ npm install cordova -g

The command line tools provide scripts to create projects, add platforms (iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone, etc), compile and deploy projects. The new structure makes it easier to support multiple platforms with one project.

$ cordova create hello com.example.hello Hello
$ cd hello
$ cordova platform add ios
$ cordova platform add android
$ cordova emulate

With 3.0, the Cordova distribution provides the core functionality to embed a webview (browser) into a native application. Cordova is distributed without any of the plugins installed. This allows you to only install the functionality you need, simplifies your code base, and reduces the amount of code in your app.

To use the Camera APIs, we'd install the camera plugin.

$ cordova plugin add https://git-wip-us.apache.org/repos/asf/cordova-plugin-camera.git

Raymond Camden's blog post about Cordova 3.0 for a list of core plugins.

PhoneGap is a distribution of Cordova, similar to how Safari and Chrome are based on Webkit. The PhoneGap distribution of Cordova come with all of the core plugins installed. Additionally the PhoneGap command line adds features like PhoneGap build support. If you don't have a native SDK installed, the compiling the project can be delegated to PhoneGap Build.

$ phonegap create example
$ cd example
$ phonegap run wp7

Overall these are great changes for PhoneGap, but may require a changes to your workflow. The payoff is that it's easier to create projects, manage plugins, and support multiple platforms.

Read and Write NFC Tags with PhoneGap

The phonegap-nfc plugin allows you to read and write NFC tags from a PhoneGap application using JavaScript.

The plugin originally supported Android. The latest release adds support for Blackberry 7.0.

After installing the plugin into your PhoneGap app (See README) it is easy to start scanning tags.

Create a function that will handle the NFC events.

function onNfc(nfcEvent) {
    // display the tag as JSON
    alert(JSON.stringify(nfcEvent.tag));
}

Create the optional success and failure callbacks. These callbacks are for success and failure of adding the listener.

function success(result) {
    console.log("Listening for NFC Messages");
}

function failure(reason) {
    alert("Failed to add NDEF listener");
}

Register listener. When the listener is added, the plugin will generate an NFC Event whenever a tag is scanned.

nfc.addNdefListener(onNfc, success, failure);

Deploy the application and scan a tag.

Example Project

The NFC Reader example project has been updated for Blackberry.

More info

The PhoneGap NFC API is documented in the README file.

Kevin wrote Building NFC applications with Android last year. Most of that information still applies.