Does The Famo.us web platform support phonegap?

Question

I would like to integrate notifications and bluetooth via phonegap to my web app built with famo.us. Is it possible?

Try a google search for this. This site is for programming specific questions and code debugging help. — Dawson Loudon, Feb 19 '14 at 00:53
We do not know yet, because famo.us is not yet released. Besides, famo.us is planning to release its own phonegap: http://vimeo.com/86727807 So I would conclude that it is very well possible. — bitbonk, Feb 19 '14 at 07:56
They're working on their own phonegap wrapper. http://www.infoworld.com/t/mobile-development/famous-were-building-better-phonegap-236267 — bioball, Mar 20 '14 at 07:05

score 6 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 28 '14 at 01:40

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Famo.us includes the Famo.us Toolbar which itself is a mod of Cordova (similar to Phonegap) and includes all of the plugins Cordova supports. It's driven from the command line.

I've emailed the CEO of Famo.us and his response was:

We are alpha testing the Famo.us Wrapper now. It's a mod of Cordova with all of the plugins from Cordova. The difference is that it's much more performant, especially on Android, than PhoneGap or Cordova.

answered Mar 28 '14 at 01:40

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Yes, and their wrapper is more performant because they package the latest chrome/blink engine in the app. If you read their FAQ, you'll see that with each version of chrome, the FPS goes significantly up – markmarijnissen Apr 03 '14 at 18:52
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It's important to note, that there is almost no difference in performance as iOS always uses it's own webView, and so there is no difference in performace. – Naman Goel Apr 27 '14 at 19:39

Bale · Answer 2 · 2014-06-01T08:52:19.367

To achieve better performance than the standard Android webview, you could try to wrap your application with the Crosswalk runtime, it works with famo.us:

download the Crosswalk archive, e.g. https://download.01.org/crosswalk/releases/crosswalk/android/stable/5.34.104.5/crosswalk-5.34.104.5.zip
unpack the downloaded archive
from the unpacked crosswalk folder, run ./make_apk.py --name="Your App" --package="com.example.app" --app-root=/your/app/root/folder --app-local-path=index.html

This will produce an .apk that you can install to the device.

More information: https://crosswalk-project.org

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Apr 27 '14 at 19:41

Yes,

Famo.us DOES support phoneGap. It's just HTML, CSS and javascript so it can be wrapped like anything else. The main difference is that PhoneGap and Cordova use an old version of Chromium which gives it bad performance on Android, which is why Famo.us's own wrapper will be more performant.

Specially on Android.

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Apr 22 '14 at 15:37

Right now The Famous Toolbelt has not been released publicly (only to a small subset of testers) but if you've used the Yeoman Generator you can quite easily wrap the compiled code into a normal Phonegap project. The only thing you should avoid doing is directly manipulating the DOM (i.e not using Famous to modify the layout & contents)

The rest is the same as writing any other Cordova app from a Javascript perspective. Just make sure to include and initialise Cordova and your plugins correctly beforehand.

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered May 13 '14 at 08:59

I have tested famo.us with phonegap and it works. However the performance when starting up is terrible. Some reason phonegap takes a long time to load. But after that it works just fine. Basically these are the steps:

1. Install phonegap

2. Create the project

# phonegap create helloworld

# cd helloworld

3. Build the project

Then copy the famo.us project folder into www folder

# phonegap build ios

(or android)

Does The Famo.us web platform support phonegap?

5 Answers5