Book Image

PhoneGap 3 Beginner's Guide

By : Giorgio Natili
Book Image

PhoneGap 3 Beginner's Guide

By: Giorgio Natili

Overview of this book

<p>You don’t have to know complex languages like Objective C to compete in the ever-growing mobile market place. The PhoneGap framework lets you use your web development skills to build HTML and JavaScript-based mobile applications with native wrappers that run on all the major mobile platforms, including Android, iOS, and Windows Phone 8.</p> <p>"PhoneGap 3 Beginner's Guide" will help you break into the world of mobile application development. You will learn how to set up and configure your mobile development environment, implement the most common features of modern mobile apps, and build rich, native-style applications. The examples in this book deal with real use case scenarios, which will help you develop your own apps, and then publish them on the most popular app stores.</p> <p>Dive deep into PhoneGap and refine your skills by learning how to build the main features of a real world app.</p> <p>"PhoneGap 3 Beginner's Guide" will guide you through the building blocks of a mobile application that lets users plan a trip and share their trip information. With the help of this app, you will learn how to work with key PhoneGap tools and APIs, extend the framework’s functionality with plug-ins, and integrate device features such as the camera, contacts, storage, and more. By the time you’re finished, you will have a solid understanding of the common challenges mobile app developers face, and you will know how to solve them.</p>
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
PhoneGap 3 Beginner's Guide
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Installing PhoneGap


The installation process of PhoneGap has been confusing for a long time because there were a lot of dependencies. These dependencies were due to the fact that in order to compile an app for different platforms, you not only have to have the platform-specific SDKs but also the platform-specific tool: in order to build for Android Eclipse, IntelliJ, or Android Studio is needed; to build for iOS Xcode is needed, and so on.

With Apache Cordova 2.x and 3 both the installation process and setting up your development environment have become much easier. You can now use the build services provided by Adobe, plus Cordova 2.x and 3 ships with a set of command-line tools that make it easier to develop cross-platform applications. Installing PhoneGap is now as easy as downloading the latest distribution from the website and unzip the package—you'll get the following folders:

   |-doc
   |-lib
   |---android
   |---bada
   |---badaWac
   |---blackberry
   |---ios
   |---symbian
   |---webos
   |---windows-phone

All the necessary tools for each platform are bundled in the archive file and for OSX users using PhoneGap 2.2 or previous it's mandatory to mount the DMG file located in the lib/ios folder and run the Cordova package available in the DMG file.

Note

The download folder of PhoneGap varies accordingly to your operating system, since now I will refer to it as PHONEGAP_ROOT in all the command-line commands.