Nitobi’s and thus PhoneGap’s acquisition by Adobe isn’t the only new thing going on with the framework, recently their beta Build service has gone open as well.
A little about PhoneGap for those unacquainted with this framework. PhoneGap is a platform that enables web developer to create native applications for numerous mobile platforms using standard web technologies and tools. It acts as an intermediary between the web application developed in HTML, CSS and JavaScript and the mobile platform, by exposing the functionality of the device, which is otherwise inaccessible to web applications, via a JavaScript API. It can even be extended to add support for features that are unique to a platform by writing a native component and the corresponding JavaScript code. It supports all major mobile platforms, iOS, Android, Blackberry, WebOS, Symbian, and even Windows Phone 7. Best of all, it supports all these platforms from the same codebase!
While PhoneGap is a free and open source framework, and the procedure for creating applications for different platforms is well documented on their site, they also offer a service called “PhoneGap:Build” (currently in beta) that allows you to upload your HTML web app code, and have it automatically signed and packaged for all the major platforms PhoneGap supports. Now this service has moved from private beta to open beta, and they have also released pricing details for this service. As you can see there is a free option available which allows for unlimited open source apps and one private app.
You can find out more about PhoneGap on their website, and can sign up for the beta yourself from here.