On the Ninth Day of PhoneGapping: Getting Help

Besides being an excellent JavaScript toolkit PhoneGap is also a kick ass community of developers. The best place I know of to get help, and where I hang out answering a buch of questions is the PhoneGap Google Group. As well there is an IRC channel at irc.freenode.net, port 6667, with a room name of phonegap obviously.

In order to improve your chances of getting a quick and informative answer I'd suggest that you follow this process when asking a question on the Google group or on IRC.

First search the archives

Your question may have already been answered. Make sure you search at least PhoneGap Google group archives before you ask your question. Go to the PhoneGap Google group and use the search field in the top right of the page.

Provide details

Give as many details as possible. Incomplete questions won't likely be answered.

Include the following at a minimum:

• what version number of PhoneGap are you using?
• which platform and version you are testing on? iOS 4.0, Android 2.2, BlackBerry 6.0, etc.
• a detailed description of your problem.
• is this happening in the emulator only, phone only or both?

Select a concise, informative subject for the post. For example, include:

• Platform, if issue is specific to Android, iOS, etc
• Keyword examples: version, jar file, phonegap plugin, deviceready event, build
• Short phrase summarizing the problem

You may also want to include:

• some sample code that illustrates the problem.
• logs taken while the problem was reproduced.

If the code or logs are huge, let's say over 20 lines please think about using a web service like Gist or Pastebin.com. Alternatively if you have a Dropbox account put the file in your public folder. Then share the link in the email rather than mailing around a bunch of large files.

An example of question

Wrong:
PhoneGap does not work for me!

Right:
I get a security error on PhoneGap 0.9.4 when I try to open a database using the Android 3.0 emulator. You can see the code I used here: https://gist.github.com/937307 and the logs I collected here: https://gist.github.com/937315. I have looked at the archives and the commits but did not find any solution. Does anyone know what could be the issue and whether this has been fixed?

An example of subject


Wrong:
Urgent. Need help with my problem.

Right:
Android / PhoneGap 1.2.0 : deviceready event not firing