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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Frameworks
  4. Cross Platform Mobile Development
  5. Dart vs PhoneGap

Dart vs PhoneGap

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

PhoneGap
PhoneGap
Stacks578
Followers685
Votes94
GitHub Stars4.0K
Forks889
Dart
Dart
Stacks4.3K
Followers3.8K
Votes452

Dart vs PhoneGap: What are the differences?

What is Dart? A new web programming language with libraries, a virtual machine, and tools. Dart is a cohesive, scalable platform for building apps that run on the web (where you can use Polymer) or on servers (such as with Google Cloud Platform). Use the Dart language, libraries, and tools to write anything from simple scripts to full-featured apps.

What is PhoneGap? Easilily create mobile apps using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. PhoneGap is a web platform that exposes native mobile device apis and data to JavaScript. PhoneGap is a distribution of Apache Cordova. PhoneGap allows you to use standard web technologies such as HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript for cross-platform development, avoiding each mobile platforms' native development language. Applications execute within wrappers targeted to each platform, and rely on standards-compliant API bindings to access each device's sensors, data, and network status.

Dart belongs to "Languages" category of the tech stack, while PhoneGap can be primarily classified under "Cross-Platform Mobile Development".

Some of the features offered by Dart are:

  • Dart’s comprehensive libraries give you lots of choices
  • Compilation to JavaScript lets you deploy Dart apps now
  • Pub package manager

On the other hand, PhoneGap provides the following key features:

  • Android
  • Blackberry
  • iOS

"Backed by Google" is the primary reason why developers consider Dart over the competitors, whereas "Javascript" was stated as the key factor in picking PhoneGap.

PhoneGap is an open source tool with 4.15K GitHub stars and 974 GitHub forks. Here's a link to PhoneGap's open source repository on GitHub.

According to the StackShare community, PhoneGap has a broader approval, being mentioned in 86 company stacks & 34 developers stacks; compared to Dart, which is listed in 19 company stacks and 74 developer stacks.

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Advice on PhoneGap, Dart

Muhamed
Muhamed

Apr 28, 2020

Needs adviceonPythonPythonJavaScriptJavaScriptDjangoDjango

I am currently learning web development with Python and JavaScript course by CS50 Harvard university. It covers python, Flask, Django, SQL, Travis CI, javascript,HTML ,CSS and more. I am very interested in Flutter app development. Can I know what is the difference between learning these above-mentioned frameworks vs learning flutter directly? I am planning to learn flutter so that I can do both web development and app development. Are there any perks of learning these frameworks before flutter?

737k views737k
Comments
Zuriel
Zuriel

Jun 7, 2020

Needs advice

Can anyone help me decide what's best for app development or even android Oreo development? I'm in a state dilemma at the moment. I want to do Android programming, not necessarily web development. I have heard a lot of people recommend one of these, and it seems that both the tools can do the job. Which language would you choose?

291k views291k
Comments
Aleksandr
Aleksandr

Contract Software Engineer - Microsoft at Microsoft-365

Dec 23, 2019

Review

What is Proguard?

ProGuard is the most popular optimizer for Java bytecode. It makes your Java and Android applications up to 90% smaller and up to 20% faster. ProGuard also provides minimal protection against reverse engineering by obfuscating the names of classes, fields and methods.

How to use it in Cordova app?

I didn't find any plugins for it. So I've implemented it by myself and shared it on GitHub.

Feel free to use!

119k views119k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

PhoneGap
PhoneGap
Dart
Dart

PhoneGap is a web platform that exposes native mobile device apis and data to JavaScript. PhoneGap is a distribution of Apache Cordova. PhoneGap allows you to use standard web technologies such as HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript for cross-platform development, avoiding each mobile platforms' native development language. Applications execute within wrappers targeted to each platform, and rely on standards-compliant API bindings to access each device's sensors, data, and network status.

Dart is a cohesive, scalable platform for building apps that run on the web (where you can use Polymer) or on servers (such as with Google Cloud Platform). Use the Dart language, libraries, and tools to write anything from simple scripts to full-featured apps.

Android;Blackberry;iOS;Windows Phone;Windows8
Dart’s comprehensive libraries give you lots of choices;Compilation to JavaScript lets you deploy Dart apps now;Pub package manager;Dev Server
Statistics
GitHub Stars
4.0K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
889
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
578
Stacks
4.3K
Followers
685
Followers
3.8K
Votes
94
Votes
452
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 46
    Javascript
  • 13
    Backed by Adobe
  • 11
    Free
  • 9
    Easy and developer friendly
  • 6
    Support more platforms
Cons
  • 2
    Never as good as a native app
  • 1
    Hard to see
  • 1
    Created for web pages, not for complex Apps
  • 1
    Poor user experience
  • 1
    Not build for high performance
Pros
  • 60
    Backed by Google
  • 54
    Flutter
  • 39
    Twice the speed of Javascript
  • 35
    Great tools
  • 30
    Scalable
Cons
  • 3
    Lack of ORM
  • 3
    Locked in - JS or TS interop is very hard to accomplish
  • 0
    A

What are some alternatives to PhoneGap, Dart?

JavaScript

JavaScript

JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.

Python

Python

Python is a general purpose programming language created by Guido Van Rossum. Python is most praised for its elegant syntax and readable code, if you are just beginning your programming career python suits you best.

PHP

PHP

Fast, flexible and pragmatic, PHP powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world.

Ruby

Ruby

Ruby is a language of careful balance. Its creator, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming.

Java

Java

Java is a programming language and computing platform first released by Sun Microsystems in 1995. There are lots of applications and websites that will not work unless you have Java installed, and more are created every day. Java is fast, secure, and reliable. From laptops to datacenters, game consoles to scientific supercomputers, cell phones to the Internet, Java is everywhere!

Golang

Golang

Go is expressive, concise, clean, and efficient. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel type system enables flexible and modular program construction. Go compiles quickly to machine code yet has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. It's a fast, statically typed, compiled language that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language.

HTML5

HTML5

HTML5 is a core technology markup language of the Internet used for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web. As of October 2014 this is the final and complete fifth revision of the HTML standard of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The previous version, HTML 4, was standardised in 1997.

C#

C#

C# (pronounced "See Sharp") is a simple, modern, object-oriented, and type-safe programming language. C# has its roots in the C family of languages and will be immediately familiar to C, C++, Java, and JavaScript programmers.

Ionic

Ionic

Free and open source, Ionic offers a library of mobile and desktop-optimized HTML, CSS and JS components for building highly interactive apps. Use with Angular, React, Vue, or plain JavaScript.

Scala

Scala

Scala is an acronym for “Scalable Language”. This means that Scala grows with you. You can play with it by typing one-line expressions and observing the results. But you can also rely on it for large mission critical systems, as many companies, including Twitter, LinkedIn, or Intel do. To some, Scala feels like a scripting language. Its syntax is concise and low ceremony; its types get out of the way because the compiler can infer them.

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