foreword
This is an older blog post I saw on the Internet. The reason was to read the PWA information, and then I accidentally clicked on the link. However, I was infected by the spirit conveyed by this article. The open and inclusive spirit of the Internet is greatly reflected in this article. This is what attracted me to the web, an open and imaginative platform. Although I don't have much contact with PhoneGap, I can feel the dreams and beliefs of developers, and I am fortunate to be in this era.
This is the first time the author has translated a blog post, and the brushwork may be blunt. If there is any inappropriateness, please point out.
The original text is here: https://phonegap.com/blog/2012/05/09/phonegap-beliefs-goals-and-philosophy/
translate
This article attempts to clear some misconceptions about PhoneGap's goals.
Our goals stem from our beliefs and development philosophy. Understanding free software like PhoneGap requires not only an understanding of the implementation details, but also an understanding of the individuals behind the code. Understand these people and understand what motivates them to tell you if the technology is right for you, if it's close to your goals, if it's right for the people you work with. The world is colorful, and so are our code and the compilers we use.
background
PhoneGap was born in the summer of 2008 at Nitobi Software. Nitobi is a web consultant with a long history in JavaScript and large-scale web development. As a consultant, some of our beliefs have been developed into the PhoneGap project and continued to be implemented by its team members. These are our thoughts that will continue to be shared by many PhoneGap developers and Apache Cordova contributors.
belief
We have two core beliefs:
- Problems solved by the web should cross platforms
- All technologies will die over time
We believe that the web should be the most feasible solution for connecting many devices with different capabilities. It is true that C is the only technology worthy of this title, but it is known that C implementation has enormous difficulties. HTML, CSS and JavaScript make up for each other's shortcomings and achieve a good balance. This is largely due to the incredibly low barriers to writing web technologies. Anyone can post their stuff, anytime, anywhere. This is the revolution, this is our evolution as a species.
Our second belief is to make a brave statement: All technology will eventually die. This is not just an observation report, history is on our side. As a consultant, with this idea in mind, we knew that tethering a wagon to a horse could have disastrous results. Of course this is not absolute. Some technologies can span decades so that experts can benefit from them. As technologists, it is our responsibility to maintain the status quo and seek change. Whether we act in this way is a choice. The consequence of inaction is likely to be to witness a technology replace ours.
Target
Understanding our beliefs will make it easier for you to understand why we would like to form a development team proficient in 8 languages and many operating systems, and faced with enough phones to fill a refrigerator every day. We wanted to put them in the fridge, but that's where we put our beer, so we built a huge wall. This wall of devices isn't meant to put all phones in, it's meant to make all proprietary platforms disappear. With faith in mind, let's take another look at PhoneGap's goals.
We want to use PhoneGap to achieve two deep goals.
- The web will be a first-class development platform
- The ultimate purpose of PhoneGap will cease to exist.
The web is clearly not a first-class development platform: opaque introspection, blunt development tools, poor API, and a rather limited set of GUI elements. The web has a lot of other issues, or maybe some features like sandboxing and a lot of missing APIs that need to be addressed, that present us with an excellent opportunity. In short, we feel that the web is a platform with flaws, so we are committed to using PhoneGap to fill those gaps.
Our second goal is not to be nihilistic, but to make the web a standardized platform. We firmly believe that the web is open to everyone, no matter how they participate. There are no locked doors. There are no walls. What we do with PhoneGap is influenced by what we've seen from W3C, WHATWG and other research like Firefox's WebAPI, BONDI, WAC, Webinos, webOS, Tizen, etc.
philosophy
Many of us are UNIX geeks. We believe in simple, sharp, purposeful development tools. PhoneGap is one such solution. We're not trying to make PhoneGap the solution for everyone. We just firmly believe that the web will solve a large number of problems encountered in software. As it develops, it will not forget its original intention.
It's not ironic that our first belief (the web solves cross-platform problems) is backed by a second belief (all technologies will die), it's why we act. We know the web shouldn't be the platform it is, and we're working to improve it. We realize that the limitations of the web platform hurt the viability of many use cases, and that those with better development tools will have the advantage of proprietary solutions. This is not the future that our beliefs and goals envision.
Dependence is the root of all suffering. We don't depend on web, JS or anything else. In fact, in order to make PhoneGap, many of us are familiar with many platforms, languages, tools and operating systems. Let them continue, maybe we can make a browser.
We update quickly, usually twice a month, and have been doing it for a long time now. I've heard that PhoneGap is behind native implementations, but when the technology works, we're rarely more than two weeks behind. In addition, the threshold for developers to write a plugin that we have not authorized is very low. I highly recommend that you read our release philosophy. I feel like we're in the best of the industry today.
final thoughts
I agree that there is no one-size-fits-all solution, and the web isn't necessarily the best tool for every job. However, the web isn't getting bad, instead across operating systems, the abstraction layer of the browser is ultimately the same (C, C++). If the web doesn't do something today, it doesn't mean it can't or won't be able to in the future, but that we haven't started to realize this capability.