I'm not that good with programing and I'm trying to work out the relative benefits, advantages and disadvantages of a comparison between Buzztouch V http://phonegap.com. So I see Buzztouches BIG 3 ADVANTAGES as updating content from control panel without needing to resubmit App The Plugins Market and the Development of Plugins Self hosting or Buzztouch Hosting & also Amazing friendly community With PhoneGap the big advantage seems to be the ability to deploy an app instantly into multiple formats Can you update apps easily i Phonegap? Has anyone out there used both? If so what do you see as the relative advantages of each platform and which do you think is best? Can anyone with more knowledge of Phonegap expand and explain more.

I've just had a look and it looks like the most confusing interface needs all different types of javacode, html and css neither am I proficient at. It looks completely different to Buzztouch and certainly more advanced in relation to coding plugins. If you google the problems people have integrating the likes of aurasma, push notifications, scringo it causes more problems. If you want a basic web app in a android/ios wrapper it looks like it may work

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I tried Phonegap a few years ago, but found buzztouch shortly after. Needless to say, I found BT much more productive, and obviously much better supported. The biggest difference being: here at buzztouch, the overall community wanted to make their own apps better, AND wanted to make buzztouch better. At other forums, people were mostly just looking for answers. Granted, I haven't tried much of phonegap since they were acquired by Adobe. But my gut feeling is that Adobe wouldn't get into this rat race unless they saw a potential to profit from it.

Buzztouch produces native apps, phonegap produces html5 apps with some native functions. With phonegap you'll need a decent knowledge of javascript/html/css. The learning curve can be decreased if you use a gui like tiggzi. It's tougher than putting an app together with buzztouch, but it's easier to hook into 3rd party api's. Pretty much anything on programmableweb.com can be quite quickly integrated but you'll need better design skills than with buzztouch. Buzztouch - Good looking, reasonably powerful apps created quickly. Phonegap - Easier to make more powerful apps, but more design and programming skills needed, along with steeper learning. Imho. Hope that helps!

that's a great summary, @raveyd

Thanks @Stobe! One thing I should mention, is that because phonegap is predominantly html5, I don't see any reason why you can't drop a phonegap project into a buzztouch framework via customURL screens... Best of both worlds perhaps?..

yup, I've contemplated that in the past. They do have some decent ways to make their HTML5 look like native controls. But with all the effort of manipulating the html and css, I'd rather invest that time in just expanding my understanding of Xcode/Obj-C

yeah, you're right of course Stobe, but looking at it from a semi-competent Android Dev point of view, I've never tried Xcode, but judging from bt posts it seems much more intuitive and understandable than developing for Android. Basically, it's rare to drop code into an android project and it 'just works' (this is probably highlighted by the lack of 3rd party bt android plugins). There are definite attractions for aspiring Android devs to use familiar html5/javascript versus native javascript bridging for dalvik.

Way to late to write as much as I should on this post. BUT... to sum it up...a few points from my perspective: --Phone gap is primarily designed for developers already skilled in html/css/javascript. It leverages WebKit (iOS and Android use WebKit for browser centric tasks, like rendering html) and processing javascript --Most methods are mapped to native iOS routines by way of stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString (in the case of iOS) and similar methods on other platforms. The idea is that nearly all the native routines on each OS have been mapped to a matching javascript method call using their black-box API. This keep the developer from having to understand what iOS (or Android, others) are doing. --phoneGap is all about HIDING (abstracting) the details from the web-programmer-turned-mobile-programmer. We are the opposite, we WANT people to understand exactly how iOS and Android are working. Most folks don't care, we think it's important to at least have a look around. --phoneGap is an additional layer of code, software, routines. We think this slows things down. They claim it doesn't, I've never seen benchmarks? We think Apple and Google have it right - code in the native language or end users will get less than they deserve. It's our opinion that Apple or Google could have EASILY "mapped" common javascript routines to native Objective C and Java method but decided that native code is faster, more secure, and less prone to errors (consider how large their API library must be even if you don't use 80% of it). --phoneGap is well capitalized and tons of folks. Millions of $ in investment, loads of people. Adobe (the owner) is no small outfit. We are a few less folks with a few less dollars. --phoneGap will go away when Adobe finds a different solution (remember Macromedia?), guess we could call it phone-stop-gap. LOL --we have loads of respect for the dudes that started phoneGap. They don't know we are (I don't think).

OK thanks to all for your contributions so far. I've looked into this a bit more and it seems to me that this is a STRATEGIC PLAY by Adobe to get more leverage of it's web development tools like Dreamweaver, by allowing people to develop "native" apps in HTML, Java and CSS, ie to allow people to reuse their web development skills and software to create Apps. RE Advantages and disadvantages I mentioned at the beginning of the thread, it seems Phone Gap 2 will be focusing on Plugins, so interestingly they will be evolving with a similar development philosophy - to allow developers to leverage other peoples work for specific features. For me, that says that those of us who are committed to Buzztouch need to foster and encourage the development of Plugins, (ESPECIALLY ANDROID & IOS enabled plugins) because this well resourced competitor will no doubt be better placed in terms of speed and already has an advantage over Buzztouch in it's ease of creating cross platform compatibility. Right now I see our tenancy to develop mainly single format plugins as a bit of a strategic disadvantage when people looking to develop apps weigh up Buzz Touch V Phone Gap. (Don't get me wrong - Not meaning to be negative here, I'm an internet strategist so I'm always interested in reality and information that supports strategic planning). I think that leaves the current advantage of Buzztouch being 1. As @David@Buzztouch said - Buzztouch uses the native code so Buzztouch Apps should be faster, more secure, and less prone to errors. 2. the control panel - ie the ability to update apps without needing to re-submit them (although I'm not sure about that, does anyone know if they allow control panel updates?) 3. As @strobe mentions, and I originally said, this is an incredibly generous and co-operative community Can't say I agree with you @David that PhoneGap will go away - it seems too strategic to their core business for that to happen. Bottom line it's in their strategic interest to empower their customers to make Apps, which broadens the possibilities for their customers and therefore makes their software more relevant, so I'd say you have a long term competitor here. SO WHAT DOES THIS ALL MEAN FOR BUZZTOUCH? To me the whole implications of this is that as a community we need to encourage each other to develop key strategic cross platform plugins as fast as possible. Maybe we should be considering ways to encourage Ios and Android members to exchange skills and develop cross platform compatibility in existing plugins? We also need to develop key strategic plugins for the small business market ASAP.

@David_Mollet: Great thoughts. Totally agree on your plugin analysis - makes perfect sense. I'm thinking PhoneGap will become something else under the Adobe brand. Of course we don't know this, just looking at some past acquisitions. No biggie either way. For sure they will always have a significant offering to solve some mobile dilemmas faces by web devs transitioning to mobile. Adobe is king of web-dev that's for sure. I think the single biggest affect PhoneGap (and tons of others) will have on our community is the validation idea. The more CREDIBLE organizations, companies, and developers that embrace some of these ideas the better. Naturally there's a competitive nature to this too and it's hard to know how we will fare long term. I wish I know, just don't :-)

How does Phonegap work when it comes to hosting with regards to self hosting? Is it possible to self host. Or is it possible to build and deploy the Phonegap apps without any hosting. Everything I has seen so far that uses Phonegap requires some form of paid hosting.

Probably the phonegap forums would be the best place to find that out..

Come on David@Buzztouch, it wasn't long ago I read your ambition was to be "the way that all Apps were started..." That's the kind of ambition I like to see. I'd like to help you plan to be one of the most successful app enablers - I know your busy but you owe me a skype chat re that webinar we were planning and perhaps we could discuss some other strategies Visa ve my plugin analysis? Now is a time for strategic planning for Buzztouch and I've got a few ideas.

This might be a little off topic, but coming from a web developers perspective. I find that creating Hybrid Apps with Buzztouch works great for me aswell. I use Buzztouch as the container, and i would have one customURL screen to produce my jQuery Mobile page. It works seemless, and the user can't tell that they left the app. Updating is easy for the mobile page, using Dreamweaver CS6, which has jQuery mobile enhancements in it. For iOS, you will need to have more native screens in the app to get approved.