Adobe has announced the release of PhoneGap 2.0, a major new version of the open source mobile application development framework. The update brings a number of new features and improvements to the PhoneGap development experience. The update also introduces support for Microsoft’s Windows Phone mobile platform.

PhoneGap allows developers to build cross-platform mobile applications with standards-based HTML and JavaScript. It supports packaging and deployment across a range of mobile operating systems and provides a standardized set of JavaScript APIs for accessing underlying platform functionality.

Nitobi, the company behind PhoneGap, was acquired by Adobe last year. Adobe donated the underlying PhoneGap code to the Apache Software Foundation so that it could be developed in an inclusive environment with open governance. The project is currently being developed through the Apache Incubator program under the name Apache Cordova.

Adobe has continued to play a major role in the project, investing in ongoing development. Adobe decided to keep the PhoneGap name to describe its own distribution of the Cordova project. PhoneGap 2.0 has been transitioned fully to a Cordova base. Adobe says that the community around the project is growing and that development is moving at a faster pace due to engagement from new contributors.

“The PhoneGap community is bigger and stronger than ever with new contributors since last year like Google, Microsoft, RIM and HP,” said Adobe PhoneGap engineering director Andre Charland in a statement. “With a bigger community and additional resources from Adobe we’re shipping new versions of PhoneGap much faster than a year ago.”

PhoneGap 2.0 incorporates an overhauled JavaScript library stack. Previous versions had separate implementations of the framework’s JavaScript APIs for each supported mobile platform. These disparate implementations were converged to create Cordova-JS, a unified implementation that can be used across all of the platforms. The undertaking was a joint effort that involved developers from Adobe, RIM, IBM, and other contributors.

One of the advantages of this approach is that will accommodate increasing the modularity of the framework. As Adobe developer Fil Maj explained when Cordova-JS was introduced in March, an important goal of the effort was to make it possible for developers to add and remove core APIs at their discretion, with a behavior much like that of PhoneGap plugins.

Another major new feature in PhoneGap 2.0 is the Cordova WebView, an embeddable HTML rendering control that incorporates Cordova functionality. This makes it possible to integrate Cordova functionality into a conventional native mobile application. This feature is supported on Android and iOS.

Other improvements include Windows Phone 8 support, the introduction of a new remote debugging tool, standardized command line tooling, and much-improved documentation. For additional details, you can refer to the official release announcement. PhoneGap 2.0 is available for download from the official PhoneGap website.

Adobe gutted its failed mobile Flash strategy in 2011, shifting its focus from the proprietary plugin to modern standards-based Web technologies. In addition to acquiring Nitobi and investing in the Cordova effort, Adobe has also been developing tools for creating rich standards-based Web content. The company is developing an HTML5 animation tool called Edge and an open source editing tool called Brackets.