Another Name Change

Another Name Change

By Jeff Tranter

This week was another slow week as many people were off part of the week due to New Year's or extended holidays.

PhoneGap, recently renamed to Apache Callback, is now being renamed as Apache Cordova. There is discussion on the mailing list about where the code repositories will reside. It may be on github or the Apache git or both. There are also discussions on what Wiki to use. We're waiting for the dust to settle before we can commit any code changes.


On the Qt mailing list, release plans for Qt 5 are starting to shape up. To meet the goal of a release for this summer, the first milestone is a proposed feature freeze on Feb 4. There will be an alpha and one or more beta releases before final. This recent thread has more details.


This week our team continued with finishing Qt 5 and WebKit building and started looking at what is needed to support the PhoneGap Compass and Accelerometer APIs. They should be quite easy to map from the appropriate mobility APIs in Qt 5 (and Qt Mobility in Qt 4). We put a few tips and tricks that we found when building Qt 5 on our Wiki page.


Some good news is that Geolocation, Media, and Storage in PhoneGap are based on W3C HTML5 standards and these are supported in the latest WebKit so there shouldn't be much work needed here.


A response on the mailing list confirmed my investigation last week that the Qt Simulator will need significant work to run under Qt 5. A Lighthouse plugin sounds like the best approach but no one is known to be working on this yet. For testing we plan to make use of the Qt 4 Simulator and some real devices. We have been able to build the Qt 4 version of PhoneGap and run it on a MeeGo Harmattan-based Nokia N9 phone.

We have been considering the low-cost Raspberry Pi boards as one of the reference platforms for our work. This week ten of the first batch of beta hardware went up for auction on eBay as a fund-raiser for the non-profit Raspberry Pi Foundation. Currently board number 1 is bidding at over US$3,000. I think I'll wait until the $35 production boards become available!