PhoneGap to become an Apache project as Adobe acquires Nitobi

Adobe has entered an agreement to acquire Nitobi, the startup behind PhoneGap. Alongside news of the acquisition, Adobe and Nitobi have jointly announced plans to donate the PhoneGap project to the Apache Software Foundation.

PhoneGap is an open source mobile development framework for building applications with standards-based Web technologies. The project provides a cross-platform Web runtime that allows application developers to reach multiple mobile operating systems with a single code base. It includes a custom API stack that enables platform integration and exposes device capabilities.

The PhoneGap APIs are generalized so that the same code can be used across multiple operating systems for tasks like accessing the camera or addressbook. The goal of PhoneGap is to make it possible for local Web applications to have the same functionality as native software. The framework currently supports iOS, Android, the Blackberry OS, webOS, Symbian, and Bada—though not all of the features are supported on every platform.

PhoneGap applications can be distributed through the conventional application stores of the various mobile software platforms—it fully conforms with the rules and policies set by the platform vendors. In addition to developing PhoneGap, Nitobi has also created a hosted build service that can automatically generate packages for the various platforms.