Phonegap web app in regular desktop browsers

Question

If I develop a web app in phonegap, can the same web app be made to run in regular desktops/laptops inside a browser?

Answer 1

It will definitely run on desktop and on a webserver whatever, IF you do it right.

I do this with many of my apps and things to note is:

• CORS is allowed in PhoneGap but may not be on Desktop browsers
• Cordova/PhoneGap APIs won't work and can throw errors if you try to call them

Good practice is to wrap your device specific event listeners etc. in the onDeviceReady function as:

    onDeviceReady: function() {
    // Register the device event listeners
    document.addEventListener("backbutton", function (e) {
        console.log("default prevented");
        e.preventDefault();
    }, false );
    document.addEventListener("resume", onDeviceResume, false);

and register that in the initialize function

document.addEventListener("deviceready", onDeviceReady, false);

Apart from that I use a primitive function to assign the variable "phonegap" that I can reference if I need to know what platform we are on, or if we are desktop (in which case it will be false).

    isPhoneGap: function() {
    var is = false;
    var agent = navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase();
    var path = window.location.href;
    if (path.indexOf("file://") != -1) {
        if (agent.indexOf("android") != -1) {
            is = "android";
        } else if (agent.indexOf("iphone") != -1 || agent.indexOf("ipad") != -1 || agent.indexOf("ipod") != -1) {
            is = "ios";
        } else if (agent.indexOf("iemobile") != -1) {
            is = "wp";
        }
    }
    return is;
},

Not super pretty but hope this helps.