How to integrate PhoneGap into an Ant build?

Question

I've been reading up on PhoneGap and really like it. I'd like to see if I can use it with GWT to write Java apps that deploy to many different platforms (web, mobile web, android, iphone, winphone, etc.).

It looks like the PhoneGap SDK comes with different versions of cordova.js for each native platform you want to support. So it looks like the Ant build will have to somehow package the GWT-generated JavaScript to the correct version of cordova.js :

• 3098DJU39I4F9IF9.html + cordova-android.js
• 3098DJU39I4F9IF9.html + cordova-iphone.js
• 3098DJU39I4F9IF9.html + cordova-windows-phone.js

I'm generalizing here, and I know those aren't the correct file names (although, obviously, 3098DJU39I4F9IF9.html is the GWT-generated code).

But then something has to kick-off PhoneGap's ability to take each of those pairings and produce the correct packaged container: an APK, IPA or XAP for each platform respectively.

So I first ask: how does a PhoneGap developer normally go from 3098DJU39I4F9IF9.html + cordova-android.js to having a myapp-android.apk , or from 3098DJU39I4F9IF9.html + cordova-iphone.js to having a myapp-iphone.ipa ? Does the PhoneGap SDK have a command-line tool that does this?

Once I understand that much, I'm trying to figure out how to automate this packaging/binding process from an Ant build. Are there any known Ant tasks that already do this? Or do I need to kick off a shell from inside Ant and just run the shell commands? Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

@rooftop is right, you have to build the native app using native SDK even if you are using Phonegap. The benefit lies in creating the UI and behavior of the app using HTML5, CSS and JS.

So, if you are not using any of the native functionality or custom Phonegap plugins, you can just have a bare minimum package structure of native apps for each of the platforms and then simply move the correct files into the concerned folders (in Android it is assets folder) of those package structures using copy task of ant. Thereafter, you can use command line compile and build tools specific to each platform to build and package the app.

Hope this helps.

EDIT: Added more details about other platforms

Basically, all SDKs contains command line tools. In fact I used to compile and build from command line, to automate the process, even for standard Windows apps (Console, Web Apps etc) which are usually performed via Visual Studio's easy to use environment. You can see this for extended tools over standard SDK for Windows phone development.

Similarly iOS is based on UNIX so there we get the power of majority of command line tools for compile, build and automation and XCode provides command line tools for building.

Further for Android, you may find this helpful.

Answer 2

You should really be using Cordova, the renamed version of PG that is an Apache project now. Command line tools were recently released for Cordova. I have not used them so I am not sure if they will help you with building or not. Typically the way you woul create the binary for the device, say an IPA file for iOS would be to actually use Xcode and the native SDK to compile and package your app. This means you need all of the native tools and SDK for each platform. There is also a hosted service from Adobe that will build the native bits for you for a fee. It used to be called phone gap build, not sure if that is still the name. You might want to look at IBM Worklight, as it does many if the things you asked about. The developer edition is free an Eclipse based for the IDE.