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InfoQ Homepage News Cordova/PhoneGap Adds Support for Windows Phone 8

Cordova/PhoneGap Adds Support for Windows Phone 8

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Cordova 2.3.0 now supports Windows Phone 8 and adds a way of opening a browser window within the application.

The recently announced Cordova/PhoneGap 2.3.0 has added official support for developing applications for Windows Phone 8. Most of the work was done by open source committers while Microsoft provided the SDK, tools, technical guidance and WP8 devices, according to Jesse MacFadyen, a PhoneGap developer at Adobe. MacFadyen said that WP8 applications now load faster than WP7 because resources are no longer unpacked to isolated storage. A number of other features include:

  • Cordova now uses IE10 engine for the WebBrowser control
  • Multi-touch events
  • Built-in LocalStorage

Developing with Cordova for WP 8 requires a Windows 8 Pro 64-bit machine and Visual Studio for development, a customized version of VS Express 2012 being included with Windows Phone 8 SDK 8.0. Cordova contains a template for generating corresponding VS projects. This Channel 9 video explains how to set up and proceed with WP 8 and Cordova, while this PhoneGap guide contains more details for getting started with WP 8. “Adapting your WebKit-optimized site for Internet Explorer 10” explains how to port an existing Cordova application to WP8.

Another important enhancement introduced in Cordova 2.3.0 is InAppBrowser, providing a way of opening a browser window within a Cordova application, allowing to open a new in-app browser, a system browser or a window in the current browser instance. Event listeners can be added to react on loadstart, loadstop and exit window events.

A notable change is dropping support for iOS 4.x, the team now supporting only iOS 5 and later.

This blog post contains more details on what’s new in Cordova.

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