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

Installing and creating new apps by using WebIDE


To install or create a new application, click on Open App in the top-left corner of the WebIDE window. You will notice that there are three options: New App, Open Packaged App, and Open Hosted App. In Firefox OS ecosystems, there are two types of apps, Hosted and Packaged. We will study the difference between these two app types in detail in Chapter 3, Getting Your Hands Dirty – Firefox OS Apps.

For now, think of Hosted apps like websites that are served from a web server and are stored online in the server itself, but that can still use appcache and indexeddb to store all their assets and data offline, if desired. Packaged apps are distributed in a .zip format and they can be thought of as the source code of the website bundled and distributed in a ZIP file. Let's now head to the first option in the Open App menu, which is New App.

Select the HelloWorld template, enter a Project Name, and click on OK. After completing this, the WebIDE will...