What Is Cordova?

Cordova is a mobile application development framework that is primarily intended for web developers. It allows web developers to use web technologies, such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, to create mobile applications. Like any other technology, Cordova has its pros and cons.

Benefits

• Easy to Learn If you’re a web developer, then Cordova has a gentle learning curve. You can easily apply your skills as a web developer to build an app with Cordova. All you really need is to familiarize yourself with the command line in order to get up and running with Cordova.
• Access to Native Functionality With Cordova, you have access to native device capabilities, such as the camera, contacts, geolocation, media, SMS, and many others.
• Free You don’t have to pay anything to use Cordova.
• Open Source Anyone can contribute to Cordova’s source code to make it better. Plugins are also open source and anyone can build custom plugins. This means that developers like yourself can easily install and use these plugins. Or you can build your own plugin and share it with the community.
• Big Community Lots of developers are using Cordova. On Stack Overflow, for example, there are close to 40,000 questions tagged with cordova. This means that you’ll never be left alone solving weird bugs (if you ever encounter them). People in the community are always willing to help, all you have to do is ask.
• Write Once, Deploy Everywhere Cordova compiles your app into a package file, which is required by most app stores. This means that apps created with Cordova can easily be deployed to the app store of your choosing. If you’re deploying to Android, Cordova creates an APK (Android Application Package) file. If you’re deploying to iOS, Cordova compiles to IPA. For Windows, it’s APPX.