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

Chapter 6. Testing and UI Automation

Ensuring that your app functions as it should is absolutely critical. When your app is small, it's tempting to leave the testing as an afterthought. After all, it's a small app and it is reasonably easy to test by hand, right? Unfortunately, even a small app that targets more than one device is immensely complicated to test, simply because you wouldn't have all the devices available for testing. Furthermore, it's incredibly boring to test your app by hand after each change on every platform; you will make mistakes doing so. Thankfully, there's a better way.

It's unfortunate that testing often gets left as an afterthought, because it's an incredibly important part of the development process. Unfortunately, it's easy to overlook it when you're first learning a language, since you're usually assumed to be working with small, easily verifiable portions of code and not a large multi-thousand-line codebase. Why write a test when a simple twenty-line program...