Overview
Apache Cordova is an open-source mobile development framework. It allows you to use standard web technologies - HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript for cross-platform development. Applications execute within wrappers targeted to each platform, and rely on standards-compliant API bindings to access each device’s capabilities such as sensors, data, network status, etc.
Use Apache Cordova if you are:
- a mobile developer and want to extend an application across more than one platform, without having to re-implement it with each platform’s language and tool set.
- a web developer and want to deploy a web app that’s packaged for distribution in various app store portals.
- a mobile developer interested in mixing native application components with a WebView (special browser window) that can access device-level APIs, or if you want to develop a plugin interface between native and WebView components.
Architecture
There are several components to a cordova application. The following diagram shows a high-level view of the cordova application architecture.