Sunday, November 20, 2011

iOS App Development with PhoneGap and Spine Mobile: Introduction

A friend of mine recently asked me if I knew how to write iOS applications. She has an idea for an app (don't we all). Well, iOS development is something I've wanted to do since I picked up an iPod Touch a couple of years ago, I just haven't made the time to do it. 

I recently started learning Node.js and the Spine MVC framework for HTML5 web application development. The last website I worked on was several years ago (ASP.Net 1.1) and I want to try something that's not in the Microsoft stack. I've done PHP in the past but didn't really want to try it again. Javascript is hot and CoffeeScript has a lot of bleeding-edge attention right now. Maybe I can get ahead of the curve.

Spine also has a mobile framework that supports HTML5 web sites targeting mobile devices. I finally got a on of the simple demo apps working this week. Pretty darn easy once the sample app and the current Spine framework were in sync. 

Once I got that working I noticed a doc describing integration between Spine and PhoneGap. PhoneGap wraps your HTML5/JavaScript app into a mobile device native application with access to the device API. You can also deploy the application to multiple platforms. It's also open source. Sounds winning to me.

In future posts I will describe how to develop an iOS native application using PhoneGap, Spine Mobile, and CoffeeScript. Since the frameworks are constantly changing, I intend to keep an up to date working copy.


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