PhoneGap Mobile application development is a hot topic these days.   More and more apps are “going mobile,” giving you immediate access to your information wherever you may be through your phone or tablet devices. Mobile application development doesn’t have to be hard – you don’t have to learn entirely new languages, you don’t have to learn multiple development paradigms, and you don’t have to maintain lots of codebases to have your application on a number of mobile device platforms.

PhoneGap enables developers to leverage their existing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript skills to create natively-installed mobile applications on multiple platforms.   You can reuse existing skills, and existing code libraries (jQuery, Zepto, Sencha, Twitter Bootstrap, etc…) to build applications targeting iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone, and more.  Since PhoneGap applications are built using Web technologies, you can easily consume services that are exposed as Web services.  That’s where Database.com comes into the picture… I recently wrote an article demonstrating how to build PhoneGap applications that leverage Database.com using the Force.com JavaScript Toolkit (forcetk.js) and the Force.com REST API.  If you are interested in building PhoneGap applications that consume data from Force.com or Database.com, you should check it out.   Nothing is complete without source code, so all the code from this article is freely available on Github.  I encourage you to fork it, and use it as a baseline for your own Force.com and Database.com applications!

Enter the Mobile Developer Challenge!

Take what you’ve learned from this post, use it to build your own mobile app, and then enter it in our Mobile Developer Challenge for a chance to win some serious cash!

Get the latest Salesforce Developer blog posts and podcast episodes via Slack or RSS.

Add to Slack Subscribe to RSS