Client
Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. is a subsidiary of Microsoft that is focused on engaging with open-source communities and developing stronger relationships with those communities. The company has been heavily involved with numerous business groups. It has also been a part of evolving the standards initiatives across Microsoft, such as W3C’s HTML5 and many different cloud standards.
Apache Cordova is a highly popular platform for building native mobile applications using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It is available for iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Palm WebOS, Bada, and Symbian.
Business Need
Apache Cordova graduated in October 2012 as a top-level project within the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). As part of our collaboration with Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc., our developers were asked to contribute to Apache Cordova by adding support for Windows Phone 7 (Mango) and Windows Phone 8 (Apollo).
Solution
For several months, our developers worked diligently with the Apache Cordova and Microsoft teams to bring support for Windows Phone. We actively participated in every project phase including System design, coding testing, and developers’ support on stackoverflow.com.
The following tasks were performed:
- Implementing JavaScript, C# Bridge, and other core functionalities for Windows Phone
- Implementing Cordova API: File, Camera, Capture, and Media
- Additional Support implementation: Facebook, LiveTile
- Adding support for Windows Phone8; implementing Windows Phone8 specific functionalities and features
- Tracking and fixing system bugs that arose
Akvelon applied its best practices for the solution design and implementation:
- In-depth analysis of the business’ needs based on historical data and brainstorming sessions with company management
- Road-map arrangement goals, deliverables, milestones, specifications, estimations, and communications
- Software design and development
- IT consulting related to solution implementation
- System deployment: testing, local demonstration, and solution feedback providing improvements to resolve additional queries
- Regular communications with the client to provide post-sale services and support
Benefit
- Cordova can now be used to write web apps for Windows Phone
- Increased productivity due to a simplified development process
- Can now use the codebase of existing Cordova apps to run on Windows Phone, which can decrease development and maintenance costs for multiplatform scenarios
- Increased number of mobile web apps in the Windows Phone market
As a result, Apache Cordova released statements praising our developers, regarding them as highly valuable resources:
- “The commit history will say the same thing, but for those that like the high level, I have to give [Akvelon employee] a huge tip of the hat for his awesome contributions along the way. [He] is responsible for a LOT…”
- “The majority of the effort has been done by [Akvelon employee] with tech support from the MSOpenTech team”
- “Our developer put in a tremendous amount of work into WP8. He had already made numerous contributions to Apache Cordova for Windows Phone 7 (WPz), so he inevitably knew his way around Cordova”
