Moving from PhoneGap to the Cordova Plugin

Phil

Hi folks,

Careful followers of Wikitude will have noticed in the past few days, we’ve moved away from PhoneGap and are now offering a Cordova plugin. As many of you know, Apache Cordova is the open-source spin-off of PhoneGap (after the acquisition by Adobe). Fear not, we haven’t given up on PhoneGap, but have renamed the Wikitude PhoneGap Plugin to the Wikitude Cordova Plugin.

PhoneGap vs. Cordova

In the past, the difference between Cordova and PhoneGap has raised more than a few questions and caused a bit of unintentional confusion, especially as both projects walked hand-in-hand in the beginning. Cordova was PhoneGap and PhoneGap was Cordova. Many people tried to compare Cordova to being the engine powering PhoneGap, very similar to Webkit acts as the engine for Safari or other browsers. Personally, I thought that PhoneGap and Cordova were too close, that a good differentiation was possible.

That all changed when PhoneGap introduced PhoneGap Build – the first service offering by the PhoneGap team, allowing to build PhoneGap apps in the cloud. Here, it became readily apparent that PhoneGap was moving towards providing a development framework and additional services based on Cordova.

Being under the Apache umbrella, Cordova is an open-source project to the core. What this means is that every other company can take the Cordova base and start building their own development framework on top of it. And companies did. There’s currently a great selection of development frameworks based on Cordova that all have their specialities and dedicated developer groups.

Look at Intel, who integrated Cordova in their Intel XDK framework, SAP making their SAP Mobile Platform compatible with Cordova or Telerik enabling their AppBuild product with Cordova. And there are are many, many more out there. This is great for providers of PhoneGap Cordova Plugins as this means that all of those frameworks can use and work with your existing plugin.

For us, it was time to honor this industry shift and reflect it by renaming our plugin to the Wikitude Cordova Plugin. Having a look at the data, Google Trends also thinks that it’s a good idea (see above). You can now find the renamed repositories for the Wikitude Cordova plugin on Github under wikitude-cordova-plugin and wikitude-cordova-plugin-samples.

While the name has changed, the quality you’ve come to know and expect from Wikitude will stay the same.

Head on over to the Download section to give our Cordova Plugin a spin, and let us know what you think in the comments below!

Cheers!

Phil – Wikitude Product Manager

PS: A word on PhoneGap Build – although Adobe relaxed their policy on 3rd party plugins for Build, we’re unable to provide you with direct integration, as our plugin is over the file size limit Adobe has imposed. Once Adobe ups the files size, we’re ready to go.