Which IDE for Phonegap? Is Eclipse enough? [closed]

Question

I am about to jump into Phonegap and realize that it doesn't have an IDE of its own. I know that I could use Eclipse to create Android-centric Phonegap apps, but what about the iOS and perhaps Windows Phone and perhaps Blackberry "versions" - can Eclipse be used for all of it? What do most Phonegappers use as an IDE?

Does PhoneGap Build make it possible to do it all in Eclipse, and then throw it up to the cloud for the iOS, etc., builds?

Answer 1

I'm currently using intel-xdk and it's been great so far. It has the ripple emulator embedded which is great to test your app quickly.

Answer 2

Yes, Eclipse is more than enough to target all the platforms.

Using PhoneGap Build, you could write the entire app using any text editor - no IDE required - and upload to their service. Their service handles the compilation in all the target mobile environments for you, and then provides the final files to download for each platform.

From their FAQ:

How do I get started with PhoneGap Build?

Simply upload your web assets - a ZIP file of HTML, CSS and JavaScript, or a single index.html file - to PhoneGap Build, point us to your Git or SVN repository. Then we’ll undertake the compilation and packaging for you. In minutes, you’ll receive the download URLs for all mobile platforms.

For ease of development I'd recommend installing one of the IDEs (probably whatever matches the physical devices you have for testing or prefer). This way you get IDE assistance like Intellisense, but as I said it's not strictly required to have one.

Your alternative if you want to compile for all those platforms locally is pretty ridiculous:

• iOS - install Xcode

• Android/BlackBerry - install Eclipse

• Windows Phone - install Visual Studio

Even if all you have is a web browser you could edit your code in its repository directly through GitHub.com's web interface, and then tell PhoneGap Build to clone the repo and build, then download the builds for each device.