At /build a number of open source communities announced their support for Windows Phone 8 SDK availability, along with other partners.
There are several open source frameworks to choose from today.
- Apache Cordova (known as PhoneGap) now supports Windows Phone 8
- Sencha Touch 2 arrives with added support for Windows Phone 8
- jQuery Mobile theme for Windows Phone 8 is available
- SQLite can be used to build Windows Phone 8 applications. You can find the bits here.
- Here is a preview version of Cocos2D supporting Windows Phone 8
- Ogre3D on Windows Phone 8
- Trigger.io has been updated to support Windows Phone 8
- SharpDX (an open-source C#/Managed DirectX API for.NET) is now available for Windows Phone 8
- Monogame (Porting XNA to Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8)
- Popular open source MVVM Light Toolkit gets a fresh new version supporting Windows Phone 8. Read the details on Laurent Bugnion’s blog
The Windows Phone team and Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. engaged early in the process with open source communities to enable Windows Phone 8 in these popular open source and cross platform frameworks.
Its is important that developers have choices and can reuse their skills and code to build Windows Phone 8 applications and this is extremely important within academia as we don't want you having to make drastic changes to your approved curricula.
This added support for Windows Phone 8 in diverse open source and cross platform frameworks was made possible thanks to new features in Windows Phone 8: native C++ programming and Internet Explorer 10 expanded HTML5 support.
Developers who have applications based on these frameworks can publish them to the Windows Phone Store in record time. And this applies to various domains, like gaming with
- C++ or C#
- Using frameworks such as Cocos 2D, Ogre 3D and SharpDX,
- Cross platform development with HTML5 and JavaScript leveraging Apache Cordova, Trigger.io, Sencha Touch or jQuery Mobile.
- Developers using popular open source tools and frameworks such as SQLite or GalaSoft MVVM toolkit will also be able to reuse their code and skills.
What the industry is saying?
“Nearly 50% of Sencha customers have expressed interest in building apps for Windows Phone 8 in the next 6-12 months. Supporting Windows Phone 8 is a natural choice for Sencha to enable our customers to build universal apps for mobile devices.” - Abraham Elias, CTO Sencha Inc.
Jay Garcia, CTO at Modus Create, and his team are developing a mobile companion application for the game Diablo III:
“Using Blizzard’s Diablo III web APIs in combination with PhoneGap and Sencha Touch, we were able to hugely increase the game’s fan base because we could build and publish our application to both iOS and Android with the same HTML5 and JavaScript code base. It literally took us a few days to get the same code to run on Windows Phone 8 thanks to this newly added support.” You can read more about Modus Create work to migrate their application to Windows Phone 8 on their blog post.
Craig Walker, CTO at Xero commented on the new support for Windows Phone 8 in Sencha Touch:
“Using web standards-based technologies such as Sencha Touch and Apache Cordova for our mobile accounting software application Xero Touch helped us target a wide range of platforms so our customers could focus on their business, not the underlying technology. Support for these technologies in Windows Phone 8 tools made it an easy Xero Touch build for our dev team, and a smart addition for our customers who need flexibility managing their business on the go.”
Brett Nagy, Technical Director at Microgroove, and his team got a chance to try the Windows Phone 8 tools and the early Sencha Touch support for Windows Phone 8:
“Our apps have been making companies more productive for well over a decade. Sencha Touch support for Windows Phone 8 has made our engineer team more productive by allowing us to easily re-use code from one mobile platform to another.
Within a couple of hours, we had the basic Windows Phone 8 themed version of an existing app without requiring any changes to its JavaScript codebase. Now that producing builds that run on Windows Phone 8 is part of our regular workflow, the next step is to build out functionality that really takes advantage of that platform. Knowing that we can do that in HTML + JS allows us to extend our reach beyond iOS and Android with minimal change to our projects timelines.”
For developers using jQuery Mobile, Sergey Grebnov from Akvelon, who previously published a jQuery Mobile theme for Windows Phone 7.5 is releasing a new jQuery Mobile theme for Windows phone 8.
So what’s NEW?
This is the first time so many open source and cross platform frameworks are on board with Windows Phone on the first day of a new SDK version release. It is great to see how much communities are eager to work with Windows Phone.
And today is just the beginning. We want to continue this effort to help open source developers enable their frameworks on Windows Phone 8. It’s important for developers to reuse their skills, expand the market opportunity to make money on our devices, and build the next generation of apps. Imagine the possibilities.
Go check out the various frameworks and more details at the Windows Phone Team Blog