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

Building Check In!


We will now build a new application, called Check In! which allows users to log the locations they are in, along with notes/comments explaining what they are doing there. We will use two new WebAPIs namely Geolocation (for finding the location of the users and their devices) and IndexedDB (for storing the location and comments of the users).

We need to declare the application type as privileged in the manifest file and seek permissions in order to use the Geolocation WebAPI by mentioning it in the manifest file. So, let's write our manifest file first. As you can see in the following code, we can add permissions in the manifest file in regular JSON format by adding the name of the WebAPI we are using, along with the reason why the application needs to use the API. This information is used by Firefox Marketplace when reviewing your application, and by users when they are shown the connect screen when the applications access the API. Here's the manifest file for the Check...