jQuery Mobile + PhoneGap = Awesome Mobile Development Platform

I’m currently prototyping an iPad application and I’ve just found working with jQuery Mobile and PhoneGap to be a breeze for mobile application development. I’ve used iOS SDK before and I’ve experimented on test applications with Android and I’ve always found issues with both the iOS and Android development frameworks. I’ve also looked into cross platform mobile development toolkits such as Appcelerator Titanium and Sencha Touch but I found these were not of me at the time. Any of the aforementioned platforms and frameworks can be used to create a great looking and functional mobile application but I found that they each ask the developer to make a trade off.

With jQuery Mobile, you develop your mobile application with HTML5 and JavaScript/jQuery. With jQuery Mobile, all of your UI is written in pure HTML5 tags with the correct CSS classes and attributes. jQuery Mobile is built on top of jQuery so many web developers can immediately start being productive with jQuery Mobile.

Everybody has an idea for the next great iPhone application. The top reasons I’ve heard from people, including from developers, as an excuse for not getting started is that they don’t have a Apple computer, they don’t want to learn another programming language, they don’t have time, etc. jQuery Mobile invalidates all of these excuses. You can use Firefox or Chrome to test your jQuery Mobile application, you develop using plain HTML5 and JavaScript, and most it’s easy to pick up.

Because a jQuery Mobile application is just a HTML5-based web application, if your an run it on your iPhone or other mobile device using the native web browser. On the iPhone, when you run a jQuery Mobile application the browser will take up a small portion on the screen for the navigation buttons, bookmarks, and other controls of the browser. One way to claim all of the screen real-estate is to create a native application, that is where PhoneGap comes in. PhoneGap is a native shell around a web application, such as those developed in jQuery Mobile. With PhoneGap, you can turn your jQuery Mobile application into a full fledged native application.