In this chapter, you learned that plugins are essential for the PhoneGap application to work beyond being a simple wrapper for web applications. Plugins give you the ability to communicate with the native components directly from the PhoneGap application.

Later, you learned that there are many ways of managing plugins, either directly with the command-line interface or with Plugman. At the time of writing, a transition for the default location was going on, so all plugins in the future are going to be hosted on the npmjs site.

In the next chapter, we will build our first PhoneGap application and learn the basics of how to run it.