Deploying Maqetta projects to PhoneGap

One way to deploy web content to a mobile device is to deploy it as a PhoneGap native application. While widgets in Maqetta generally do not take advantage of any PhoneGap APIs to native services, deploying as a PhoneGap application does provide an easy way to distribute and launch the application, with the benefits of having the HTML+CSS+JS content installed in memory on the device for quick rendering. The cloud-based PhoneGap:Build site makes it easy to wrap a web application as a native PhoneGap app, without needing to use any developer tools. Simply provide a zip of the relevant portion of your workspace and the service will generate native apps for a variety of platforms:

1. Create an HTML page in Maqetta using "index.html" for the name of your initial page. w3c widget configuration file and icons may be provided as indicated by PhoneGap documentation but are not required
2. Use the Download button in the Files view to download your workspace or some subset of your workspace as a zip file.
3. Follow PhoneGap getting started instructions to register at the site, build native apps from your zip file, and deploy it to the devices.

Some things to note:

• to build for the iOS target, you must purchase a signed developer's certificate from Apple and create provisioning profile for a certain number of devices where you will be able to test your app. There may be a limit to the number of devices you can associate with your account.
• the zip file you submit must be less than 10MB in size. When using the Download feature in Maqetta, you can reduce the size of the zip by selecting only the libraries you need for your page.
• the Android target does not include files beginning with an underscore ("_") This will cause failures for many Dojo-based applications. A manual build of Dojo dependencies on your page may solve this problem by concatenating these files into larger "layer" files which do not use underscores in their filenames. Some simple DojoX Mobile applications may not run into this problem using the standard Dojo distribution.
• the Blackberry target typically fails, apparently due to the inability to handle files beyond a certain size
• merely wrapping a web application as a PhoneGap application may result in rejection from the Apple App Store [reference?]