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

IndexedDB support and polyfills


Before we go further, it's important to discuss the support situation for IndexedDB. As it is a more recent specification than Web SQL Database, it has much less support. On some platforms that support it, is can also be extremely limited and/or buggy.

Note

For up-to-date browser support, see http://caniuse.com/#feat=indexeddb.

As of this writing, IndexedDB had the following mobile browser support:

  • iOS: No support on iOS 7.x; extremely buggy behavior on iOS 8.x as well as iOS 9.x

  • Android: no support for versions less than 4.4; full support on Android 4.4 and higher

Desktop support fares quite a bit better; Chrome and Firefox has supported a full IndexedDB implementation for several versions now, while Safari on Oave has a buggy implementation (which should be no surprise, given that iOS also has a buggy implementation). On the desktop, Internet Explorer has had a partial implementation since version 10.

All of this means that if you're going to support different...