Book Image

Building Mobile Applications Using Kendo UI Mobile and ASP.NET Web API

Book Image

Building Mobile Applications Using Kendo UI Mobile and ASP.NET Web API

Overview of this book

With the world becoming more mobile, there is a growing need for mobile websites and applications. Building these from scratch is not a simple process. Kendo UI Mobile makes building websites and applications easier than ever before. Build applications for phones and tablets in no time at all and provide your user with a native look and feel.Building Mobile Applications Using Kendo UI Mobile and ASP.NET Web API helps you to understand the concept of building mobile applications using HTML5 based frameworks, specifically Kendo UI Mobile. It teaches you in a simple step-by-step manner how to create a service backend layer using ASP.NET Web API and how to integrate it with your front end mobile application, which is the missing piece of the puzzle for most developers who are new to mobile applications development. Learn everything from the basics of HTML5 to design and development of a mobile application using Kendo UI Mobile and ASP.NET Web API. Integrate them in the right way using extensible and maintainable JavaScript code.Starting with the basics of the Kendo UI platform, learn how to build a real world mobile application from scratch. You will explore the Kendo UI framework elements and integrate the sample mobile application with the ASP.NET Web API service. One of the most important things that you will learn from this book is how to organize your code using the JavaScript Revealing Module Pattern. You will also take a journey through Kendo UI Mobile widgets with lots of code samples hosted in jsFiddle. At the end of this book, you will complete the integration of the sample application and master fixing real world problems utilizing your newly acquired professional techniques that will save you time and effort.Building Mobile Applications Using Kendo UI Mobile and ASP.NET Web API will help you improve your mobile application development skills using hands-on examples, and will help you address the common problems faced by beginners as well as experienced web programmers. 
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Building Mobile Applications Using Kendo UI Mobile and ASP.NET Web API
Credits
About the Authors
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

HTML5 mobile web application design guidelines


Developing applications for mobile devices is quite different from developing websites for desktops and laptops. There are a wide range of mobile devices available with varying screen sizes and processing powers. Mobile devices access the Internet with varying bandwidth; they can be connected to a Wi-Fi network and in an instant they can go to a slow 2G network. All these factors make mobile applications development different from traditional web applications development.

Here are some guidelines which will help developers while building a mobile web application:

  • Animations with CSS3 rather than with jQuery: Whenever possible use CSS3 animations as they are handled in the browser natively so that it can make use of the hardware resources thus increasing the performance.

  • Responsive design using CSS3 media queries: Mobile devices these days have varying screen sizes and it's a basic expectation that a mobile web app will fit on the screen of the device requesting the application. Responsive designs using CSS3 media queries help the same code base provide an optimal viewing experience on a wide range of devices.

  • Use CSS3 gradients instead of images: Using CSS3, we can provide gradients in your web page without using specifically cut images. This helps to preserve bandwidth by not having images travelling over the wire and provides more flexibility on the page design.

  • Go for SPA (Single Page Application): SPA (for example, Gmail) provides a quicker and responsive navigational experience to the user. They are distinguished by their ability to redraw any part of the UI without requiring a server roundtrip to retrieve a page. While building mobile applications, go for SPA if it does not complicate your development process. Kendo UI Mobile is an excellent framework to build single page applications as you will see in the future chapters.

  • Make full use of offline mode and local data storage: Almost all modern mobile browsers these days support quite a lot of the HTML5 specification, as their update frequency is very high as compared to their desktop counterparts. Although we can safely assume that these features will be available on the mobile browsers, it's a good idea to check whether these features are enabled on the client browser using simple JavaScript conditional statements.