According to the , "Nitobi was the original creator and is one of the primary contributors to the PhoneGap framework. In October 2011, Adobe acquired Nitobi, enabling the team to focus solely on the PhoneGap project and continue its work on efficient development across mobile platforms. ... There is also vast global community that contributes to the project, including many from IBM, RIM, and more."

The scope of involvement by so many big players is fascinating and raises hope that a true cross-operating system development platform for that relies on well-understood programming paradigms could become a reality. Just imagine if the gap between identifying a smartphone-based business need and rolling out a robust, fully featured, multi-platform app was a matter of weeks or perhaps even days rather than months!

So, what does PhoneGap do? It provides access to smartphone APIs for everything from accelerometer to camera, compass, contacts, file, geolocation, media (audio and video), network, notifications (alert, sound, vibration) and storage, all via JavaScript interacting with HTML and CSS. It's beautiful! (See for which APIs are supported on which OSes.)

Of course, even though PhoneGap is out of beta, it's not all wine and roses. If you want to check out PhoneGap be prepared for poor documentation, some conflicting instructions and moderately serious debugging.

For a general overview that is rather clearer than the PhoneGap documentation see "," and for installation of the latest version check out "," both by Steve Husting. Following Steve's instructions I had a "Hello World" app up and running on the simulator within about 15 minutes!