Book Image

PhoneGap 3 Beginner's Guide

By : Giorgio Natili
Book Image

PhoneGap 3 Beginner's Guide

By: Giorgio Natili

Overview of this book

<p>You don’t have to know complex languages like Objective C to compete in the ever-growing mobile market place. The PhoneGap framework lets you use your web development skills to build HTML and JavaScript-based mobile applications with native wrappers that run on all the major mobile platforms, including Android, iOS, and Windows Phone 8.</p> <p>"PhoneGap 3 Beginner's Guide" will help you break into the world of mobile application development. You will learn how to set up and configure your mobile development environment, implement the most common features of modern mobile apps, and build rich, native-style applications. The examples in this book deal with real use case scenarios, which will help you develop your own apps, and then publish them on the most popular app stores.</p> <p>Dive deep into PhoneGap and refine your skills by learning how to build the main features of a real world app.</p> <p>"PhoneGap 3 Beginner's Guide" will guide you through the building blocks of a mobile application that lets users plan a trip and share their trip information. With the help of this app, you will learn how to work with key PhoneGap tools and APIs, extend the framework’s functionality with plug-ins, and integrate device features such as the camera, contacts, storage, and more. By the time you’re finished, you will have a solid understanding of the common challenges mobile app developers face, and you will know how to solve them.</p>
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
PhoneGap 3 Beginner's Guide
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Getting started with the PhoneGap APIs


Since the release of PhoneGap 3.0 all the APIs are available as external plugins; you will learn more about plugins later in this book. At this point, all you need to know is that treating each single API as a plugin allows you to compose a version of PhoneGap suited to your project needs.

Plugins are installed and removed using a tool called Plugman ; from a developer's point of view it's just a command available in the cordova-cli utility.

$ cordova plugin add URL_TO_THE_GITHUB_REPO

where URL_TO_THE_GITHUB_REPO is the path to the plugin (i.e., API) repository.

The following list summarizes the currently available APIs and the command to run to add them to a PhoneGap project. If you want to remove a plugin, use the $ plugins remove command instead.

  • Basic device information:

    • Device API: $ cordova plugin add https: //git-wip-us.apache.org/repos/asf/cordova-plugin-device.git

  • Network and battery status:

    • Network API $ cordova plugin add https: //git-wip-us.apache...