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 Web APIs


Web APIs is a collective term used for various APIs that are available to JavaScript in the window context of a loaded HTML document. Firefox OS has additional Web APIs for hardware capabilities on smartphones and tablets, which do not usually exist on desktop or laptop computers. For example, the camera API can be used to open the camera of the device whenever required by a Firefox OS app. There are various APIs that have access to sensitive data, such as the contacts and settings API. Further in this chapter, you will study most of these APIs in detail.

According to Mozilla, there are more than 30 standard WebAPIs for Firefox OS. These APIs assist a developer to gain privileges for interacting with the hardware component of the device. For security purposes, not all of the APIs are open for developers to use in their projects directly, and these APIs require a certified level of permission. This permission is not for third-party developers, and is only available for...