Adobe has announced the acquisition of Nitobi, the company which created and sponsors the open source PhoneGap project for creating cross-platform mobile applications using HTML5 technology.
Apparently this does not affect the plan to donate PhoneGap to the Apache Software Foundation:
We are also excited to announce our donation of the PhoneGap code to the Apache Software Foundation,” said Dave Johnson, chief technology officer, Nitobi. “Adobe has been fully supportive of our decision.
Adobe already offers PhoneGap integration in Dreamweaver 5.5, though I found some gaps in this initial release.
I spoke to Nitobi CEO André Charland earlier this year.
Smart move, though it will be interesting to see how Adobe now balances mobile app development with PhoneGap vs mobile app development with Flash – both of which are cross-platform approaches.
Here at Adobe’s MAX conference in Los Angeles I will be quizzing Adobe about how it plans to evolve its design and development tools to better support PhoneGap.
While I don’t expect Adobe to drop Flash all of a sudden, I think they see the writing on the wall; that one of the dominant, if not the most dominant, mobile platforms (iOS) will not have Flash on it and that HTML5/CSS/JS is a way, if not *the* way, forward. I expect they will straddle the fence on this for awhile, until such time as they have to make a decision, either to drop Flash or, if Flash sees a sudden resurgence, to push it again. In the meantime, I expect they will continue to hedge their bets, making tools to fit either development chain and put off the decision of which horse to back until they have to choose one or the other.