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Interview With Brian Leroux of Adobes PhoneGap Team
Mobile web development is tough especially when you're trying to offer native-like experiences to users. Several years ago, a small company called Nitobi took on the effort of simplifying building native mobile apps using traditional web development skills. Ambitious and sometimes controversial, the effort known as PhoneGap grew out of this need and one converts left and right.
One of the main masterminds behind the framework is Brian Leroux who apart from being well-respected for his development skills and incredibly likeable personality is also one of the savviest mobile developers around. Considering the number of mobile devices PhoneGap targets, you have to be pretty well-versed in a variety of devices and OSs.
Nitobi has since been acquired by Adobe and the PhoneGap codebase donated to the Apache Software Foundation to continue its development as the Apache Cordova project. Brian moved over to Adobe and continues to steward the codebase. In this interview, we'll chat with Brian about how PhoneGap came about and what the future of mobile web holds.
Q Let's start with the usual. Could you give us a quick intro about yourself?
Hello, I'm Brian. I work on Apache Cordova, PhoneGap, and a new css library called Topcoat at Adobe. In my spare time I created a code joke site called https://wtfjs.com which kind of follows me around.
Q You were one of the creators of PhoneGap. How did Nitobi decide to build such an ambitious framework?
I've definitely been one of the stewards of PhoneGap but it is very important for me to say that MANY people of contributed to the creation and growth of it. No one person really decided to do anything it was a lot of forces coming together at once. PhoneGap was an outcome of the primordial soup that was the new Github model for open source, nascent mobile web browsers, and new generation smartphones. We started hacking, and did the whole thing in the open, and eventually more people subscribed to the project philosophy and utility. It grew from there.