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

Porting existing web apps to Firefox OS


Now, you will be study how to port existing web applications to Firefox OS; that is, how to make Firefox OS applications out of them. We will go through the workflow of converting a web application to a Firefox OS application, based on the differences that you studied in the previous chapters. Here, we will use the example of Clickr (which was originally a web application and is still live at http://stockwolf.net/clickr/) and see how we converted this to a Firefox OS app. The web application looks like the following:

Conversion of a web app to a hosted Firefox OS application

To convert a regular web application (without making any code changes) such as Clickr, we need to add an application manifest file to the root of the application that specifies details about the application. In addition to this, we need to add assets such as icons for the operating system to display them after the application has been installed.

However, these things get complicated...