Version 2.0 of the open source framework for developing cross-platform mobile applications, PhoneGap has been released, bringing with better integration, command line tooling and enhanced documentation.

According to Brian LeRoux, Lead Developer for PhoneGap, “PhoneGap 2.0 is all about a vastly improved developer experience. Our docs are now much more comprehensive, including the long requested commitment to our Plugin API. Developers are going to have a supported way to use the PhoneGap bridge to build their own browser APIs for native calls.”

The new version allows a PhoneGap application to be integrated into another native application as a WebView. Its command line tools have been normalized so that common cross-platform tasks use the same terminology for creating projects, debugging and emulation and the remote web inspector for PhoneGap has been ported to Node.js and can now be easily installed with NPM (Node Package manager).

It is almost a year since PhoneGap 1.0 was released and it has gained a large following and the project has thrived. This is partly because last October Adobe acquired Nitobi, the creators of PhoneGap, enabling the team to focus solely on the PhoneGap project and also because the project was contributed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under the name Apache Cordova.

According to Andre Charland, director of Engineering for PhoneGap at Adobe:

“The PhoneGap community is bigger and stronger than ever with new contributors since last year like Google, Microsoft, RIM and HP. With a bigger community and additional resources from Adobe we’re shipping new versions of PhoneGap much faster than a year ago.”

The full set of major new features in PhoneGap 2.0, as listed on its blog are:

• Cordova WebView - This allows for the integration of PhoneGap, as a view fragment, into a bigger native application.

• Command Line Tooling (CLI) (Android, iOS and BlackBerry) - CLI tooling brings a standard nomenclature to common tasks across platforms such as project creation, debugging, and emulation. Normally, these are different incantations for each platform vendor making cross platform development workflow inconsistent and jarring; we’ve fixed that.

• Enhanced documentation – Getting-started guides, plugins, migration guides and more to help accelerate the development of mobile applications and make it even easier.

• Web Inspector Remote (Weinre) ported to nodejs – The availability of a node module means easy installation using Node Package Manager (NPM).

• Cordovajs (Support for unified JavaScript across platforms) - We’ve seen dramatic advancements to performance, security, and API symmetry across platforms thanks to the herculean effort of unifying our JS layer.

• Transition to Apache Cordova and nearing graduation from incubation

• Windows Phone support

• Improvement to iOS app creation - see Improvements in Cordova 2.0.0 for iOS