Will Phonegap current version work on BlackBerry OS version 5? - blackberry

I am new to mobile development and I was wondering if the applications I develop using phonegap will work correctly on Blackberry OS 5 since they don't support it yet. I won't need any fancy features in my app and wanted to use phonegap to develop for Android, IPhone and Blackberry. But of course I am having problems with the different versions of Blackberry OS just like everyone else.
Thanx.

I had a chance to test this once. I have put my Phonegap application on 5.0 and observed how it behaves. Application has launched properly. But i Observed following issues.
HTML5 is supported but localStorage and sessionStorage is not supported.You need to find an alternative.
HTML Page transition is too slow. End used will certainly not accept the performance.
Few jQueryMobile API's don't work.
You cannot be sure that page will be viewed same as you see in 6.0+. Few elements get distorted.
You need to test each and every UI element and see if it is working proper.For example datepicker displays date on right side of the page instead of left
Few PhoneGap API's don't work or they crash.For example API to launch camera crashes.
After observing above issues i felt that even if phonegap is supported in 5.0 it doesn't make big sense.

Yes, but to run on OS version 4.x you have to target the PhoneGap BlackBerry application, while to run on OS version 5 or 6 you need to target BlackBerry Widgets / WebWorks -- the same application may work on both if you use compatible features, but you'll need two different builds, as though they were two different kinds of phone.

Now the support for earlier versions of BlackBerry has been withdrawn from Cordova 3.0 onwards, which in turn supports BlackBerry 10 only. Refer the following link for more details.
PhoneGap - BlackBerry Support
Thanks,
prodeveloper

Related

can a mobile application developed for io6 work correctly on ios7 and ios8?

Could you please indicate us if an Mobile Application developed for iOS6 can work correctly (without any adaptation) on iOS 7 and 8 or there will always be any functional and display issues and therefore it will be necessary to redevelop this Mobile Application for iOS 7 and 8.
Your iOS6 application might run correctly without any problem.
It might also show some visual problems (iOS6 did not cater for the new iphone6/6+ formats or even 3x retina displays), or could fail (crashes) because it's using deprecated functionalities. As suggested, the best you can do is test your application with those newer iOS versions, there's no straight answer to that question.
If your application is not already on the AppStore, but you have its source code and would like to submit it at some point in the future, it will most likely need to be reworked because the submission process will check for compliance with newer i-devices.

iOS PhoneGap app using WebGL

Which is the WebView of a PhoneGap app, is the Safari mobile or desktop one?
Is it possible to use WebGL in PhoneGap apps? If not which they work around to use them being able to submit the app to the Apple Store and Android Store
Will I be able to submit to Apple Store a PhoneGap app that uses WebGL?
UPDATE:
iOS 8 brought WebGL support on the UIWebView and WKWebView, so if you don't want to support previous versions you can use it without CocoonJS
See more details on ludei's website
OLD:
If you want to create HTML5 apps with WebGL for iOS and android, try CocoonJS
Right now it's the only way to create WebGL apps that run on iOS and android
I just figured out your issues in two points.They are-
phonegap build app links won't open in safari. For More details Please check HERE
Neither the iOS nor Android browsers support WebGL so it is pretty much a non-starter in PhoneGap.
Apple are clearly working towards supporting WebGL in a more general sense, as can be seen in their support for it in iAds.
It’s possible to take advantage of WebGL using standard embedded web views ( using private APIs).
check HERE too fro browser support.
I personally recommend Ejecta for it being open source:
https://github.com/phoboslab/Ejecta
The Android port doesn't seem widely active, but the main ios port seems well maintained, supporting WebGl.
The latest Android versions support webGL directly - if using older Android versions, Crosswalk can also be used along with phonegap to utilize webgl support.
https://crosswalk-project.org/

PhoneGap Support for Blackberries 6.0+

I need to decide whether to use phonegap to create a blackberry application. The lure of the app being deployable to various platforms is enticing however I need to know if it will be able to support Blackberry versions 6.0+. So far the website claims support for 5.0, and 6.0. There is a link at: PhoneGap Supported Versions that is meant to explain which ones are supported however one link doesn't work and another takes you to a dated stackoverflow thread. I get the same results from other searches.
My question is can phonegap support higher blackberry operating systems such as 7.0 and later developments by RIM? Also if stability in terms of not having to continuously modify the application for oncoming OSs was important, would it be better to use RIM's WebWorks SDK rather than PhoneGap?
If you are only going to target RIM phones then the WebWorks SDK is probably the best way to go. If you want to target other devices that run iOS and Android then you should look at PhoneGap.
We get really good involvement from RIM on PhoneGap. They did all the code to add Playbook support to PhoneGap and are currently involved in the unified JS project as well.

How many versions of Blackberry apps we have to make?

There are basically two issues that are confusing us:
Will a Blackberry app made for mobile phones work on the Blackberry tablet? I see that there is a tablet SDK as well.
Do we have to make a separate versions of Blackberry app for different mobile phones?
The reason we ask this is because we come from the Android environment where we can use one SDK to make app which will work on all mobile phones and tablets as well.
The BlackBerry Smartphone SDK is different from the BlackBerry PlayBook Tablet SDK.
The smartphone applications are written in Java (RIM's version of J2ME, essentially), while for now, there are two editions of the PlayBook Tablet SDK: WebWorks, for development with web technologies like Javascript, HTML, and CSS, and one that is Adobe Flash/Actionscript/Air based. I think there is also one in development with C++ as a foundation.
You can start with the BlackBerry Developer zone - it covers development for both smartphones and tablets:
http://us.blackberry.com/developers/
The BlackBerry Tablet SDK for Adobe AIR can be found here: http://us.blackberry.com/developers/tablet/adobe.jsp
The BlackBerry Tablet WebWorks SDK can be found here: http://us.blackberry.com/developers/tablet/webworks.jsp
Information about development for the BlackBerry smartphones can be found here: http://us.blackberry.com/developers/javaappdev/
For smartphone development, you would probably want to target the minimum RIM OS that would include the most devices owned by your target customer base.
Right now, RIM claims that more than 96% of BlackBerry smartphones can be reached using SDK 4.5 or higher.
RIM keeps an up-to-date set of statistics on this: http://us.blackberry.com/developers/choosingtargetos.jsp
Typically, if you're targeting recent devices (4.7 and newer), then you don't need to worry about splitting your code to target multiple devices, as long as the UI is written without making any assumptions as to screen size, etc.
If you're targeting anything older than 4.7, then it may benefit you to make two versions - one for touch screen devices, and one for devices that aren't touch-screen. The touch-screen API is introduced in 4.7, and while it's somewhat backward compatible, in our experience, while you need the touch-screen API available for devices that support it, it's best to leave it out for older devices that do not have support for the touch API or the virtual keyboards that come with it.
If you're going to split the code, RIM's compiler does come with a C/C++ - style preprocessor which comes in very useful.

Which BlackBerry OS to target for enterprise web applications?

I am deciding between which library to use for development: jQuery Mobile or Sencha Touch. The application I am building will specifically target enterprise (Fortune 500) BlackBerries. The application will not require any hardware features, but the user experience/UI rendering should be as good as possible.
I am not familiar with BlackBerry OS adoption/upgrade statistics so I don't know what platform is my lowest common denominator. Are most enterprise users on BlackBerry 6+ or 5+ or 4+? I just don't know and I don't know where to find those statistics. What is your recommendation?
In my opinion the first step should be studying the audience of your future application.
What model do they use, do they use the most recent models, or they tend to keep working with old models.
The main point is that RIM stops releasing device software for old BlackBerry models.
For instance for BlackBerry 8800 the most recent available device OS version is 4.5
But your customer may have a lot of empolyees who use this device.
Devices with device OS version 4+, but before 5.0, do not work properly with complex html/javascript pages.
In version 5.0 there was implemented better support for complex html/javascript functionality in your applications.
Conclusion: If your potential customers are not using old devices, then start supporting device OS versions 5+, otherwise use SDK version 4.x according to the target devices.
As best practice, I would jump into learning and developing for the latest Operating System, which would be 6. I know all of our customers are working on Bolds a Torches, which means they'd be using 6.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackBerry#Operating_system
Additionally, I would look into creating Adobe AIR applications. They work for Application 6 and Playbooks as well.
http://us.blackberry.com/developers/started/bbdevapproach.jsp
You will likely found RIM's own "Choosing a target OS" page helpful. It has stats on current active devices as well as narrowing down to those devices that use the AppWorld.

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