Last month, I represented the PhoneGap team at the
Facebook Mobile Hack Roadshow events happening around the world.
From March 12-29, I visited 5 different countries–Isreal, Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea and Japan– and talked about PhoneGap with established and emerging developer communities. Each event had a similar format which included 6 hours of presentations followed by 5 hours of hacking. The presentations were mostly done by Facebook developers and covered the basics of the Facebook platform and an in-depth talk on their mobile platforms.
My PhoneGap talk was the last presentation of the day and focused on the Facebook Plugin for PhoneGap. The plugin allows developers to build apps using the Facebook Javascript SDK and use PhoneGap to gain access to native single sign-on and native dialogs. It works by adding hooks into the Facebook Javascript SDK that would in turn call the plugin. The plugin then maps those calls to the Facebook Native SDK for that platform.
Check out the screencast for installing the plugin on iOS at .
All the events had great attendance. The attendees were very interested in the presentations and the ratio of people who stayed and decided to hack was high. Each event had some groups using the PhoneGap Facebook Plugin or indicated they planned on implementing it after they created their web app.
The most challenging part of the tour was having non-English speaking developers in South Korea and Japan. We solved this by having amazing translators at both events. As a presenter, I had to remove some jokes and simplify what I said during the presentations. During the hackathon, I helped people with a lot of hand motions to break through communication barriers. And of course, when Mark Zuckerberg did a surprise appearance in Tokyo, there was no need for a translator with how excited the crowd got.
One thing was clear to me at every event I attended and presented at: a large number of people have heard about PhoneGap. Over 80% of people raised their hands at each event when I asked them if they have heard about PhoneGap. This showed me that the PhoneGap love is spreading all over the world.
The PhoneGap team plans on continuing to help these up and coming developer communities to use PhoneGap for their projects and assist them with more advanced topics. We will continue to attend as many conferences and meetups as we can to ensure this. To see a list of where we are speaking next, check out our
event calender or find us on
http://phonegap.meetup.com.
If you are interested in checking out the PhoneGap Facebook plugin, check out the source code over at
https://github.com/davejohnson/phonegap-plugin-facebook-connect.
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