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

Security access levels (permissions)


Security access levels for Firefox OS Web APIs to access the device are divided into three categories, as mentioned earlier. Let's now study the three application types in detail:

  • Hosted apps: These kind of apps have only on-demand permissions; they do not and cannot make use of the Privileged or Internal/Certified APIs. They can either be self published or distributed via the Firefox OS Marketplace after being digitally signed. The reviewing process of Web apps and Privileged or Internal Apps is different in the marketplace. These applications can be hosted applications as well. This is the default permission level of a Firefox OS application (by default type: web, if the type is not specified in the manifest file).

  • Privileged apps: These kind of applications are apps that have permissions for device-sensitive APIs, such as contacts, browser, and so on. The type of application has to be declared as privileged in the manifest file of the application....