What is PhoneGap and Cordova?

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TRANSCRIPT

So to start we need to understand, what is PhoneGap and what is Cordova? PhoneGap is a system that exists from some time that you can use to build your web applications like web games made in HTML5 to mobile devices. So what you do is you need to kind of get the browser that you execute the game and you're going to pack that into a single application to upload to your Android, or iOS, Windows Phone, or any other platforms you want. It creates a web view. It simulates a browser, then it executes your game there. This is very good because if you are a game developer for the HTML5 platform, you just worry about making the game work with a library like Phaser or Pixy, for example. Then you use PhoneGap to pack that application and execute in your mobile phone. It's really that easy, okay?

And Cordova is kind of the base of PhoneGap. It began with PhoneGap. Then the owners of PhoneGap, they open-sourced their code so its maintained in the Apache license and then PhoneGap is a set of useful applications that we can use and easily view the apps with Cordova. So the good thing about PhoneGap is if you go to PhoneGap.com, you're going to see some links here, some very useful links. There's a link to guides and documentation for PhoneGap, which is very important for you to read. But the good thing about PhoneGap are these three first links here. There are a series of items in the web page, but you're going to notice that we have a desktop app which we can use so there's no need for you to worry about command line interface, about difficult tools to use. You also have a PhoneGap Developer, which is a mobile app where you can test changes instantly in your mobile phone, which is great. You can test your game straight in your target platform and the one that's the focus of this course is the PhoneGap Build. They explain this very well. It says here, "Take the pain out of compiling locally." And yes, sometimes compiling projects, they are a time-consuming task. They just take a lot of time to happen. There are lots of configurations you have to do in your machine and sometimes there is an SDK update and you have to update lots of things in your computer.

So what PhoneGap Build does is you're going to upload whatever code, whatever game, you made in PhoneGap to the PhoneGap cloud and then that's going to be built for you. You just upload a file, sit and wait for a little bit and then your builds are going to be completed for you. Sometimes you're going to face a queue because many ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcUIWWtQ5ds