PhoneGap is a free open source development tool and framework that allows web developers to take advantage of the features in the iPhone SDK from HTML and JavaScript.

Gap is a free open source development tool and framework that allows web developers to take advantage of the powerful features in the iPhone SDK from HTML and JavaScript. We're trying to make iPhone app development easy and open. For many applications a web application is the way to but in Safari you don't get access to the native iPhone APIs, and the that's the problem we're trying to solve.

It is written in Objective-C and allows developers to embed their web app (HTML, JavaScript, CSS) in Webkit within a native iPhone app. We're big advocates of the Open Web and want JavaScript developers to be able to get access iPhone features such as a spring board icon, background processing, push, geo location, camera, local sqlLite and accelerometers without the burden of learning Objective-C and Cocoa.

Gap also has a web app that allows web developers to quickly package their web app into a native iPhone app by providing a URL, a name and icon graphic the web service with automagically create a native iPhone application. We haven't open sourced that code yet but we're going to soon.

Gap was conceived at iPhoneDevCamp II by Nitobi developers Brock Whitten, Rob Ellis, freelance designer Colin Toomley and Eric Oesterle.