PhoneGap 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 experiences. Most of the samples deal with real use case scenarios, based upon the code of an open source application available through the most popular app stores.
Chapter 1, Getting Started with PhoneGap, covers how to set up dependencies and mobile SDKs in your development environment.
Chapter 2, Building and Debugging on Multiple Platforms, deals with choosing the development tool that best fits your needs and it will provide an overview of several tools and some debugging techniques.
Chapter 3, Getting Started with Mobile Applications, covers how to improve the performance of a mobile app. You will see how to define the building blocks of a modern hybrid app built using web standards and PhoneGap.
Chapter 4, Architecting Your Mobile App, deals with creating the backbones of your mobile app, focusing on the architecture of the app and on bootstrapping the app.
Chapter 5, Improving the User Interface and Device Interaction, deals with consolidating the app architecture, learning how to implement the navigation mechanics, and how to handle the user interface depending on the network status.
Chapter 6, Using Device Storage and the Contacts API, helps you to understand the offline storage capabilities of PhoneGap and how to interact with the Contacts API.
Chapter 7, Accessing Device Sensors, deals with introducing device sensors, and explaining their power and limitations with regard to the effective use of the APIs provided by the PhoneGap framework.
Chapter 8, Using Location Data with PhoneGap, covers how to get the Geolocation information from a device and how to integrate the external Geolocation service in your app.
Chapter 9, Manipulating Files, covers how to manipulate files on a device. With this knowledge you will be able to store information and read files on a device.
Chapter 10, Capturing and Manipulating Device Media, covers how to access the device camera and all the other capturing tools available in the device.
Chapter 11, Working with PhoneGap Plugins, covers how to extend the PhoneGap capabilities using native code. You will see how PhoneGap's apps architecture allows developers to extend the framework capabilities with the help of custom plugins.
Appendix A, Localizing Your App, covers how to create a localized app using PhoneGap. You will be introduced to the Globalization API, a very powerful tool that allows you to work in conjunction with other JavaScript libraries.
Appendix B, Publishing Your App, covers how you can publish your app on different app stores and discusses the common issues faced.
A personal computer with an Internet connection and a command line tool to use with the command line utilities distributed with PhoneGap. Windows users should install Cygwin, available at http://www.cygwin.com/, to have a Linux look and feel environment; OS X and Linux users just need the default command line tool.
This book is for web developers who want to start to be productive in the mobile market quickly. In fact by using PhoneGap it's possible to deploy native applications based upon web standards. The book assumes a very small knowledge of HTML/CSS/JavaScript and of mobile platforms, such as Android, BlackBerry, iOS, and Windows Phone, and takes the reader step-by-step into a deep overview of PhoneGap and its API.
In this book, you will find several headings appearing frequently.
To give clear instructions of how to complete a procedure or task, we use:
Action 1
Action 2
Action 3
Instructions often need some extra explanation so that they make sense, so they are followed with:
This heading explains the working of tasks or instructions that you have just completed.
You will also find some other learning aids in the book, including:
These are short multiple-choice questions intended to help you test your own understanding.
These practical challenges give you ideas for experimenting with what you have learned.
You will also find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "The root folder contains the AndroidManifest.xml file; it's important that the package name and the activity name defined in the files match the arguments used when launching the ./create command"
A block of code is set as follows:
({
baseUrl: 'js/',
paths: {
mustache: 'libs/mustache',
alice: 'libs/alice.min',
text: 'libs/require/plugins/text'
},
name: 'main',
out: 'js/main-built.js'
})When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
function processImages(){
var pixelRatio = window.devicePixelRatio;
if(window.devicePixelRatio > 1) {
var matches = document.querySelectorAll("img.highRes");
for(var i = 0; i < matches.length; i++) {
matches[i].width = (matches[i].width / pixelRatio);
}
}
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
$ cordova create ~/PhoneGapProjects/PGGettinStarted/ch06/storage SampleStorage
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "On Mac the command-line tool is named Terminal and you can find it by navigating to Applications | Utilities | Terminal."
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