Book Image

Mastering PhoneGap Mobile Application Development

By : Kerri Shotts
Book Image

Mastering PhoneGap Mobile Application Development

By: Kerri Shotts

Overview of this book

PhoneGap is a useful and flexible tool that enables you to create complex hybrid applications for mobile platforms. In addition to the core technology, there is a large and vibrant community that creates third-party plugins that can take your app to the next level. This book will guide you through the process of creating a complex data-driven hybrid mobile application using PhoneGap, web technologies, and third-party plugins. A good foundation is critical, so you will learn how to create a useful workflow to make development easier. From there, the next version of JavaScript (ES6) and the CSS pre-processor SASS are introduced as a way to simplify creating the look of the mobile application. Responsive design techniques are also covered, including the flexbox layout module. As many apps are data-driven, you'll build an application throughout the course of the book that relies upon IndexedDB and SQLite. You'll also download additional content and address how to handle in-app purchases. Furthermore, you’ll build your own customized plugins for your particular use case. When the app is complete, the book will guide you through the steps necessary to submit your app to the Google Play and Apple iTunes stores.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Mastering PhoneGap Mobile Application Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Using flex-box layout


Complex layout in CSS has often been a source of frustration. Sometimes, it is possible to use the display: table-* variants to get the desired effect; but these are far from ideal for nontabular data.

The Flexbox layout module provides us with mechanisms to control the layout of our elements, even when the dimensions of the parent element or viewport may not be known. This makes it ideal for responsive mobile applications. Flexbox enjoys reasonably good support in modern browsers (see http://caniuse.com/#feat=flexbox). Unfortunately, the specification has gone through several iterations, and older browsers implemented the specification at those stages. Anything lower than iOS 6.1 and Android 4.4 uses an older version of the syntax. So, if you plan on supporting either of these, you would have to support multiple versions of the specification. Generally, this isn't difficult; but older versions don't always support the same features. In most browsers, you'll also have...