Adobe wants in on your PhoneGap builds. The company today announced the availability of cloud-based build tools for PhoneGap applications. PhoneGap Build is available as part of Adobe’s US$50-per-month Creative Cloud service subscription, and is also available as a limited free platform, or as a standalone subscription.
The problem that PhoneGap Build tackles is one of environments. In order to build cross-platform mobile HTML5 applications with PhoneGap, all of the target platforms’ development tools must be installed on the build system. This can be tough to maintain, as when Apple, Google, Microsoft and RIM all revise and update their environments, the PhoneGap build system also needs to be updated.
Ben Forta, director for developer relations at Adobe, said that the PhoneGap team decided over a year ago how to solve the build problem in the cloud. “You can point it at a GitHub repository, go to the PhoneGap Build service; you can create an application, tell it where to find the code, and it spawns processes and returns the packages for each device,” he said.
Adobe focuses on making the PhoneGap ecosystem easier to use because the company offloaded the primary development duties for the core of PhoneGap to the Apache Foundation, shortly after it acquired PhoneGap last year.
“The core PhoneGap engine is an Apache project,” said Forta. “Where we see the value is on the developer experience. There is a service right now available at debug.phonegap.com where we offer real-time debugging,” he said, giving an example of the types of services and support Adobe hopes to offer to the PhoneGap ecosystem “Our focus is making PhoneGap itself open source and getting broad support for it. What we can focus on is the development process and the tooling.”
PhoneGap Build is available today as part of an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription.
