John M. Wargo

I'm working on the example application for the last chapter of PhoneGap Essentials. The chapter is about the Storage API and I've build a little mileage tracker (for expense management) application to highlight how to use the different capabilities of the API.

I got most of the application working but ran into a problem. I was able to create a local database and write to it, but unfortunately the call to the SQL INSERT method returns an error, even though the record is being successfully written to the database. Weird. I can't find anything online that explains why this is happening. Ugh!

Anyway, I was doing some testing in the Chrome browser and decided to go over to a device to do some testing just to make sure it wasn't Google Chrome giving me the trouble. It wasn't, but I did encounter something that's both fun and interesting.

PhoneGap includes the Weinre debugger which is a cool application that allows you to debug applications on a device, but watch what's happening in a desktop browser. I've been using it during my work on the book since it makes on-device debugging so much easier. Anyway, I was in Weinre poking around at the application's HTML when I noticed that part of the application screen (on-device) was acting weird. Take a look at the following screen shot:

The miles input field had some weird stuff around it and I could see the highlight moving to different fields. Turns out that as I highlighted the page elements in the desktop browser, the client-side application highlights the element I was pointing to - in real-time. I expected the device application to update the console on the desktop, but what I wasn't expecting was for the client-side appliction to also react to what I was doing on the desktop. Way, way cool.

The Weinre stuff works, too bad my application isn't.

Although there are many books out there that mention PhoneGap or cover the topic lightly, it was nice to see books in the works entirely on PhoneGap. With PhoneGap Beginner's Guide being the first one out the gate, I was excited to receive my copy. Unfortunately I agree with many of the other reviewers on Amazon in that there were a lot of incomprehensible sentences in the book. It's clear that Packt, like with many other of their books, rushed this one out and didn't give it the thorough read it needed.

The bigger thing for me was that the book's really not about PhoneGap. Sure, there is a chapter on installing the PhoneGap framework and tools and there are a few chapters on the PhoneGap API's, but the majority of the book covers mobile web development rather than PhoneGap. The majority of the example applications shown in the book were demonstrated in the desktop browser rather than in a native application built using PhoneGap. I understand that you can test some UI stuff in the desktop browser, but PhoneGap has No UI API's - none. So why would you write a PhoneGap book that's mostly about UI? PhoneGap is all about interacting with the device, so as soon as a developer creates their application's UI and starts using the PhoneGap API's, they have to leave the desktop browser and either test in a real PhoneGap application or use RIM's Ripple emulator.

I did a quick count and there's only about 76 pages on PhoneGap related topics (out of a total of 283 pages – about 25%) while the rest of the book is all about how to do mobile web development. I didn't buy a PhoneGap book to learn about Mustache, XUI or jQuery Mobile – I bought the book to learn more about PhoneGap. I figured since the author worked for Nitobi (the creators of PhoneGap) that I'd learn things I didn't know. Not the case.

I truly believe this book should have been called Mobile Web Development for PhoneGap Developers – that way the purchaser would at least know that this book is more about mobile web development than it is about PhoneGap.

Now I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that I'm in the process of completing my own book on PhoneGap called PhoneGap Essentials, so I may be a little biased. One of the things I do while writing Essentials is to assess every topic against the title of the book. I'm regularly trying to pull stuff out of the book because it's not related to PhoneGap. If you read PhoneGap Essentials, you'll find that it's all about PhoneGap, nothing else. Since PhoneGap doesn't have any UI API's, you'll find some pretty horrible UI's in the sample applications I'm including in the book. Everything's focused on how to use the PhoneGap framework and tools and how to use the PhoneGap API's (all of them) in your PhoneGap applications. If you're an experienced PhoneGap developer, don't buy the book – you're only going to be disappointed. If, on the other hand, you're new to PhoneGap and want to know what PhoneGap is all about, then PhoneGap Essentials is the book for you.

I've been using the heck out of PhoneGap Build these last few weeks as I work through the API chapters in PhoneGap Essentials.

For the last three weeks, the process for building BlackBerry applications was broken, it would build an app for you, but it wouldn't include the phnegap.js file, so none of the PhoneGap features in the application would work. They finally fixed it today, but it was broken for about 20 days, and that was painful.

Recently, I've been focusing on Android development since the BlackBerry stuff was broken. Unfortunately the Android stuff is partially broken as well. You can build an app for Android using PhoneGap Build, but about 70% of the time, the application that's built for you won't install on an Android device.

If you take a look at the following figure you'll see an example of what I'm experiencing. The two downloads shown in the figure are for the exact same application. When I build an Android application using PhoneGap Build and it's 3k smaller than I expect it to be, I know it won't install on the device. I just go back to the portal and start the build again. Most of my evenings have been spent repeatedly rebuilding the same app over and over and over again to get one version that will install.

The problem is that there's no efficient way to communicate build problems to the PhoneGap Build team. There's the help pages that you can link to directly from Build, but people are using that forum for any PhoneGap related question, so there's no easy way to just see what kind of problems are being encountered for Build. People should be using the Google Groups PhoneGap forums for general development stuff and leave the help forum associated with the Build portal for Build related questions.

Another problem with that forum is that there's no easy way to see your own posts. Anything I've posted up there is just there and I can't open a page and see my questions and the associated responses. Google Groups is the same way and it's really frustrating. With PhoneGap Build still in beta, there should be a true issue tracking system in use so we can all work together to help make Build better.

I've been using Joomla! for some time now and I've gotten quite comfortable with it. Recently I've been helping August's cub scout pack, a neighbor and close friend build web sites using Joomla! and I've gotten pretty competent with it.

I branched out a bit and used Concrete 5 for my johnwargobooks.com site. It's pretty cool - it's more of a web based site builder than a true CMS like Joomla and Drupal.

I've setup domains for my new PhoneGap book, PhoneGap Essentials, and another site I wanted to build. For these two new sites, I've decided to build them using Drupal 7. I'm excited to get started working on the sites; as soon as I finish writing the book (which should be by Christmas) I'll start working up the book's site and let you know when it's up there.

Stay tuned.