PhoneGap has been the major player in establishing a common platform for mobile devices. It is a library that exposes native device capabilities to a JavaScript interface, making it possible to program many different mobile devices in JavaScript, HTML5 and CSS, and compile it to operate on different platforms.
PhoneGap was purchased by Apache, and a new name given, “Cordova”. Codova is released as an open system project and licensed as such. You will find that many of the different tools for writing software are based on the Cordova framework.
So, what does Cordova do, and why do so many tools base their system on it? Cordova is the glue allowing native device features to be made available inside JavaScript like code. Normally these features are not accessible because of security. For example, Cordova exposes the capabilities of a mobile device such as Vibrate, GPS, Phone Book, storage, and much more.
If the capability you desire to access on a mobile device is not exposed on Cordova, you can write your own extension and then use it in your code.
Cordova operates as a hybrid mobile device meaning that some of the code is native when compiled, and some of it operates externally. As a result, software written using Cordova is generally not as fast as completely native code. Usually this is not an issue, and the benefits of a wider distribution usually outweigh the value of writing a completely native application.
For more information do a google search on PhoneGap and Cordova. You can find Cordova at cordova.apache.org.
Cheers,
Ben