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Adobe Announces PhoneGap Enterprise for Mobile Development

Adobe Systems Inc. yesterday announced PhoneGap Enterprise, a set of mobile app development tools positioned as just one part of a broader marketing initiative.

The new product is based on the popular PhoneGap framework designed for cross-platform development of mobile apps.

PhoneGap Enterprise was announced yesterday at the company's Summit conference in Salt Lake City along with a host of new products that enhance the Adobe Marketing Cloud initiative.

Another part of the marketing program is Experience Manager, which lets marketers modify the mobile apps without having to enlist the help of developers. Other tools were announced to measure the effectiveness of mobile marketing campaigns; support Apple iBeacons that provide user locations services in sports stadiums and other public places; and better engage customers across mobile apps.

PhoneGap lets developers target iOS, Android, Windows Phone and other OSes with one codebase in a hybrid approach using open technologies such as JavaScript, CSS and HTML 5 instead of native languages such as Objective-C (for iOS) and Java (for Android). It's "hybrid" because developers can access native device resources through JavaScript calls and the resulting apps are packaged as OS-specific, but layout rendering is done with WebViews instead of specific OS UI frameworks.

Originally developed by Nitobi Software, the PhoneGap technology was acquired by Adobe in 2011. It was open sourced and is available via an Apache 2.0 license on GitHub. PhoneGap technology is based on the Apache Cordova project. Adobe also offers a PhoneGap Build service where development is done in the cloud and source code is compiled using the latest native SDKs. The standard PhoneGap tools offered by Adobe come in free and paid versions.

The new PhoneGap Enterprise development tool is one segment of the integrated "Cloud" marketing package, with Adobe providing support, training and associated marketing services such as Experience Manager. "Developers can build apps across platforms, meet aggressive time-to-market demands, and support third-party integrations," Adobe said in its announcement. "Marketers can easily update app content, optimize the app post launch and manage app reviews and variations without the need for app development skills. The unique drag and drop functionality ensures that marketers can easily change and preview app content including images, videos, interactive and text-based content."

Besides these app-editing capabilities for non-developers, the new enterprise product provides services for analytics and app optimization and push notifications to engage users.

More specific app development details weren't available today at the company's Web site, but it did feature a form developers could fill out to be notified of further news. "We're getting ready to release a beta of new enterprise features of PhoneGap," Adobe said.

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

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