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When it comes to the pace of mobile app innovation, there are a couple leaders in the field that need to be watched on a regular basis. Foremost among them is the PhoneGap, also known as Apache Cordova these days. Call it the leader of the leaders. Today the company announced the newest version of its platform, PhoneGap 1.4.0. In addition to fixing many of the bugs found in version 1.3.0, the PhoneGap Build cloud service will be fully supported in the new version. Check out below to see what is new in the platform.

It seems like a fairly straightforward question: As a developer, business and enterprise, do I develop Web apps, native apps or some combination thereof? Answers to that question are anything but simple. Who is your target audience? What is the purpose of the app? There are a series of diverse questions that must be answered before jumping right into development.

Research firm Forrester, as is its wont to do, attempts to answer the question. Forrester's answer? It's complicated. The firm's answer to Web v. Native has evolved since the middle of 2011 though. Last year, Forrester said to do both native and Web-based apps. At the beginning of 2012, the firm has changed its tune.

PhoneGap is turning 1.3 today. There are a plethora of new features, tools and controls across five platforms in the new PhoneGap release. Biggest among these is Windows Phone's support of all PhoneGap features, a first for any mobile platform that is not iOS or Android.

PhoneGap, which technically changed its name to Apache Callback for legal reasons, will now actually be called Apache Cordova when it releases version 1.4. It does not really matter what PhoneGap calls itself, the functionality continues to improve with each successive iteration. A full suite for Windows Phone should be a big boon to the platform as it reaches out for more developers.

While browser-based operating systems haven't taken over the world, 2011 has been a pretty good year for Web developers. It's an exciting time to be working in Web development, and there's never been a better crop of tools to work with. Web standards are eclipsing proprietary toolkits, and the development community is creating its own set of open source tools to work with. Here's a look at some of the best we've seen in 2011.

PhoneGap released its next iteration last week and it has a variety of changes for developers to take advantage of. PhoneGap has also been contributed to the Apache Software Foundation and, as we have reported before, will be called Apache Callback when it is a full-fledged member of the open source foundation. There is also iOS 5 support and Windows Phone 7 support. What is new in PhoneGap 1.2?

HTML5 development studio appMobi is releasing a new tool today for developers to create, emulate and test PhoneGap projects. The appMobi PhoneGap Mobile App XDK is an integrated developer environment (IDE) that offers a full suite of developer tools for creating HTML5 and PhoneGap applications. The new appMobi XDK is the first of its kind for PhoneGap development and is an intuitive tool for developers working on PhoneGap projects.

Adobe just made a big splash in the mobile development world today by announcing that it has acquired Nitobi, the maker of the popular PhoneGap framework. Nitobi confirmed the acquisition and added that part of the acquisition was that Nitobi continue with its application to place the PhoneGap source code in the Apache Software Foundation.

PhoneGap is a "wrapper" that developers use to turn Web applications built through HTML5 and Javascript into native applications for mobile platforms such as iOS and Android. Terms of the acquisition were not announced. Essentially what Adobe has done is to distance itself from the problems it has created with Flash on mobile and align itself with the hottest mobile developers in the ecosystem.

Popular open source mobile development framework "wrapper" PhoneGap has applied for consideration to the Apache Software Foundation and contemplating a name change. In a message in PhoneGap's Google Groups development page, Nitobi software developer Brian Leroux said that the project has "initialized the process to contribute PhoneGap to the Apache Software Foundation" and that they may change the name to Apache DeviceReady.

Except for the name change, this would potentially be a great move for PhoneGap. The Apache Software Foundation is a top-level community of developers and users that provides organizational, legal and financial support to open source projects. Many consider ASF to be among the "developer elite."

Developer framework Sencha announced a major update to its platform last week that further enhances its HTML5 capabilities and provides easy wrappers to package Web applications into native form for Android and iOS. It is a bulky update to Sencha and is representative of how the tools of the mobile developer industry need to keep pace with innovation.

Sencha provides the entire horizontal stack capabilities that professional developers need to write, package, scale and wrap Web and native applications. If that sounds kind of like the hash browns at The Waffle House, it is. Sencha wants to place itself as the go-to framework for mobile commercial software development.

Last week, open source HTML5 framework provider Nitobi and Microsoft announced that PhoneGap is ready for use with Windows Phone Mango. That means that Windows Phone developers can now add Web app functionality into native Mango applications in the same way that they can with iOS and Android. The question remains: Is Windows Phone ever going to be a viable consumer option?

PhoneGap has come charging into the mobile development ecosystem in the last several months. Nitobi's star is hitched to the rise of HTML5 and functional APIs. Yet, Microsoft working with PhoneGap is perhaps further validation of the framework than PhoneGap is a validation of Windows Phone as a legitimate platform.