Book Image

Learning Firefox OS Application Development

By : Tanay Pant
Book Image

Learning Firefox OS Application Development

By: Tanay Pant

Overview of this book

With broad compatibility, the latest in web technologies, and powerful development tools, Firefox is a great choice for both web developers and end users. Firefox OS’s promotion of HTML5 as a first class citizen opens up the walled gardens of mobile application development for web developers. It is because of this initiative that no special SDKs are required to develop for Firefox OS. This book will help you excel in the art of developing applications for Firefox OS. It sequentially covers knowledge building, skills acquisition, and practical applications. Starting with an introduction to Firefox OS, usage of WebIDE, and then the application structure, this book introduces applications of increasing complexity with each chapter. An application that measures your tapping speed, a geolocation tagging application, and a photo editing and sharing application are the three applications that will be built from scratch. You will learn about topics such as the difference between various types of Firefox OS applications, application manifest files, offline apps, and designing principles for applications. You will also learn to test and submit the applications to the marketplace and finally maintain the repository of the Firefox OS application. By the end, you will be able to develop beautifully designed, fully-fledged, and rigorously tested Firefox OS applications and also share them at the Firefox OS Marketplace.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Learning Firefox OS Application Development
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Introducing Firefox OS


Mozilla and Telefónica started a joint project in 2011 under the code name Boot to Gecko—a new mobile operating system built on top of a web technology. Mozilla publicly demonstrated the open source Firefox OS in February 2012. The reason to roll out this platform was to provide developers with an alternative operating system that respects the user's privacy and security so that new smartphone users have a choice in buying. Firefox OS devices are a great choice for users who wish to make a transition from feature phones to smartphones, or for those who have concerns about the privacy settings. Mozilla is best known for developing open source software, such as Firefox Web Browser, and it answers to its users rather than answering to its stakeholders. The aim of Firefox OS is to run on devices that have limited hardware capabilities while still providing users with a unique and smooth experience.

Let's now take a look at a screenshot of a device that uses Firefox OS: