alunny

(disclaimer: I work for Adobe on a competing service (PhoneGap Build) and have worked with PhoneGap for years)

This is a silly benchmark - there is absolutely no reason you would put 1000 calls at once, sequential or parallel, across this sort of bridge in a real app. You probably shouldn't be calling any JavaScript API in a client-side app 1000 times at once.

The bridge in PhoneGap Android probably is slower than the one in Forge but

1) that's a tradeoff the PhoneGap devs were willing to make for wider compatibility, support for older devices, and isolation from the bizarre Android WebKit bugs that crop up in every release.

2) synthetic benchmarks aside, there's no indication this would affect the usability of the app.

Take the camera example in the article. A PhoneGap call (judging from the graphs) takes about 14ms, a Forge call about 3ms. That's for the entire round trip (JavaScript -> Native -> JavaScript), so divide each in half for each side of the trip.

With PhoneGap: * first half of the trip (7ms) * Android presents Camera activity, user picks a photo, Android returns control to original app (say, 500ms, very conservatively) * second half of the trip (7ms) = 514ms

With Forge: * first half of the trip (1.5ms) * Android presents Camera activity, user picks a photo, Android returns control to original app (500ms) * second half of the trip (1.5ms) = 503ms

This is much closer to a real-world use case - and the calls to native APIs entirely dominate the time spent on the bridge.

Node itself (the core js library) isn't strict mode compliant: it uses octal literals for filesystem interactions.

For very short, "oh there's a syntax error I missed" commits, "commit --amend" is very useful, and quicker than "rebase -i".

The Google charts API doesn't provide an SSL interface - if you use it on a page served over https, you'll get a mixed content warning.

[EDIT] I was mistaken, see andrewjshults's reply.

The Underscore functions do exactly the same as Resig's in the simple case (when passed just an array of numbers). They're longer because they accept custom iterators for non-numerical arrays.

Well yes, but if you have 20+ tabs open in a couple of windows, it's disruptive and time consuming to close and reopen all of them.

releasing the source != pushing out over the air OS updates

It's a sixty line JS file that's been online for less than a day. I don't think API stability is a major concern at this point.

camelCase is the de facto standard for JavaScript - all of the DOM APIs and major libraries use it.

edit: oh, you probably mean the language name. Again, JavaScript is the correct formatting, even if it looks silly to most eyes.