Is there a difference between PhoneGap and Cordova commands

Question

I just installed Phonegap for the first time and just browsed through the docs  What confuses me is the fact that some docs are using the command  phonegap  and some  cordova    Android platform guide     cordova create hello com example hello  HelloWorld    Command Line Interface guide tells     phonegap create hello com example hello HelloWorld   Is there a difference between those two commands  resulting in different files and folder structures   or are they just aliases for the same thing

User · Answer

they re both identical  except that phonegap cli can help you build your application on PhoneGap Build  My suggestion is to use the cordova CLI if you don t use the PhoneGap build service

User · Answer

This first choice might be a confusing one but it   s really very simple  PhoneGap is a product owned by Adobe which currently includes additional build services  and it may or may not eventually offer additional services and or charge payments for use in the future  Cordova is owned and maintained by Apache  and will always be maintained as an open source project  Currently they both have a very similar API  I would recommend going with Cordova  unless you require the additional PhoneGap build services

User · Answer

I found this difference which forced me to use a mixed bag of phonegap and cordova cli commands when building my app    phonegap plugin add  couldn t handle command line parameters correctly  whereas  cordova platform add  works flawlessly  The command I use is    cordova plugin add https   github com crittercism PhoneGap git --variable IOS APP ID   my license key     Note I am using phonegap 3 5

User · Answer

Here are differences that I have discovered   I am comparing the phonegap 3 3 0-0 18 0 CLI to the functionality described in the cordova 3 3 0 documentation for that CLI     ls  is an option for  cordova plugin  but not for  phonegap plugin     You must use  list  instead  e g     phonegap plugin list   serve  is not documented in  phonegap -help  but it does exist and it does work   It will not find and load phonegap js so the pages never fully load but it still does provide some value   I m not sure if this is different than the behavior cordova   phonegap platform add   does not work in phonegap   You must do a  phonegap build   to add support for a platform    Note that you may also experience some confusing error messages in phonegap where the suggested solution refers to using the cordova command

User · Answer

I have also noticed that cordova has a  serve  command that Phonegap doesn t   This command launches a local server on port 8000   This is handy for running your app in Chrome and using the Ripple emulator

User · Answer

Above  Abhishek mentions the command line differences specified in two URLS    PhoneGap  http   docs phonegap com en edge guide cli index md html Cordova  http   cordova apache org docs en 3 0 0 guide cli index md html The 20Command-line 20Interface   One thing to point out is that  as of this post  the phonegap one looks to be almost the same as the cordova one  and is probably not an accurate image of the command line option differences   As such  I installed both on my system so I could look at the differences   These are just a few of them   Hopefully they are brought more in sync sometime   If anyone has better information  please tell me    Adding platforms seems to be done differently between the two commands   phonegap uses  install  command  cordova uses  platform add  command   Adding creating projects seems to be the same between the two commands   same command line options supported   Obviously  as has been stated  phonegap can use PhoneGap Build  so it has the corresponding options to trigger that or local builds Quite a few other significant command line differences  simply by running  cordova help  and  phonegap help  and comparing the two    I guess my point is that the phonegap CLI documention mentioned quite often is not really for the phonegap CLI  but for the cordova CLI  at this time   Please tell me if I am missing something   Thanks

User · Answer

From what I ve read  and please correct me if Im wrong    Phonegap claim that they started trying to make this but couldn t  so they passed it to the Apache Software Foundation   Apache in their awesomeness  Long live Apache  fixed it  developed it  and made it supremely awesome   Now Phonegap are trying to maintain and enhance a copy they took back  but keep stuffing it up   So  by my thinking  I want a solid and trustworthy dev platform made by seasoned professionals that I can trust  rather than a patched upon sub-version of said  Therefore Id say I am a Cordova developer NOT a Phonegap developer   Iv also read that in a second desperate attempt to gain popularity and control over the great works of Apache  Phonegap has now been sold under the Adobe flag  You know Adobe  they are the guys who do nothing for free and are so bad at maintaining software life-cycles that their apps need to perform updates every time you blink  and for some reason each of their apps are about 100 times the size you would expect   I guess that is the summary of my research if I didn t read it wrongly   And if true  then lets all drop this whole Phonegap nonsense and just stick with Cordova

User · Answer

Now a days phonegap and cordova is owned by Adobe  Only name conversation was different  For install plugin functionality   we should use same command for phonegap and cordova too   Command   cordova plugin add cordova-plugin-photo-library  Here    cordova - keyword for initiator  plugin - initialize a plugin cordova plugin photo library - plugin name    You can also find more plugin from https   cordova apache org docs en latest

User · Answer

http   phonegap com blog 2012 03 19 phonegap-cordova-and-whate28099s-in-a-name   I think this url explains what you need  Phonegap is built on Apache Cordova nothing else  You can think of Apache Cordova as the engine that powers PhoneGap  Over time  the PhoneGap distribution may contain additional tools and thats why they differ in command But they do same thing   EDIT  Extra info added as its about command difference and what phonegap can do while apache cordova can t or viceversa  First of command line option of PhoneGap  http   docs phonegap com en edge guide cli index md html  Apache Cordova Options http   cordova apache org docs en 3 0 0 guide cli index md html The 20Command-line 20Interface   As almost most of commands are similar  There are few differences  Note  No difference in Codebase  Adobe can add additional features to PhoneGap so that will not be in Cordova  Eg  Building applications remotely for that you need to have account on https   build phonegap com Though For local builds phonegap cli uses cordova cli  Link to check  https   github com phonegap phonegap-cli blob master lib phonegap util platform js   Platform Environment Names  Mapping    local      cordova-cli   remote     PhoneGap Build   Also from following repository  Modules which requires cordova are   build create install local install local plugin add   list   remove run mode platform update run   Which dont include cordova   remote build remote install remote login logout remote run serve

User · Answer

Late answer but I think this might be useful   There are differences between the two cli  phonegapis a command that encapsulates cordova  In the create case the only difference is an overriden default app  In some other cases the difference is much more significant  For instance phonegap build comes with a remote build functionality while cordova build only supports local builds    A big limitation I found to PhoneGap is that  AFAIK  you can only build a release APK using  the PhoneGap Build service  On Cordova you can build with cordova build android --release

[cordova] Is there a difference between PhoneGap and Cordova commands?

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