Foreword: By Jim Huempfner

There is no doubt that everything is going mobile—not just because everything can but because it is having a transformational impact on how we live, work, and communicate. Mobile applications have become critical solutions for both businesses and consumers.

As a result, many companies are gravitating toward mobile web as their primary mobile app development technology. If not done correctly, defining, designing, building, and maintaining mobile applications for both evolving multiple OS platforms and the ever-changing device landscape can be difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. Numerous commercial and open source products and frameworks that can potentially simplify mobile application creation and development are coming to the marketplace.

PhoneGap is proving to be one of the most popular solutions in this space, allowing users to quickly and easily build applications that will run on multiple platforms, leveraging your existing web development skill sets (tweaked for mobile development, of course). Because of the emergence of this solution as a front-runner and the challenges customers face in implementing the technology, John Wargo has written this book to aid developers in the process.

After a decades-long career in various computing technologies, John started to focus on mobile development platforms in 2006 when he began working for RIM, the makers of the BlackBerry handheld devices. When I first met him, he was teaching a group of colleagues and me the ins and outs of BlackBerry development. John has a passion for teaching that is surpassed only by his passion for mobile development, which was demonstrated both loud and clear during the class. You’ll see that passion and depth of understanding clearly demonstrated in this book as well.

We were fortunate to hire John to work in AT&T’s Mobility Group in 2009. He quickly became my team’s go-to expert on mobile development, constantly evaluating technologies and learning new options in this rapidly changing mobile environment. John is a particularly valuable resource in helping our customers define their mobile application strategy and understand their options for mobile development, whether they are using the mobile web, native, hybrid frameworks (such as PhoneGap), or mobile application platforms such as MEAP or MCAP.

Mobile technology professionals will benefit from this book because it provides experienced mobile web developers with everything they need to know to transition their mobile web applications into native mobile applications using PhoneGap. This book walks you through configuring and using the development environments you need to work with PhoneGap plus shows you how to use each of the APIs provided by the framework; it’s everything you need to get started developing with PhoneGap.

Success in the rapidly evolving and ever-changing mobility space should not cause fear and frustration of inaction. Rather, we should embrace technology enablers like PhoneGap and resources like this book to bring truly winning solutions to reality.

JIM HUEMPFNER
Vice President
Industry Solutions Practice
AT&T