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

Introduction to plugins


In order to be productive quickly with PhoneGap plugins, it's important to keep in mind how the framework works. A PhoneGap app consists of three main layers:

  • The user interface, developed using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

  • The business logic, developed in JavaScript

  • The PhoneGap framework, native code exposed to the business logic through a JavaScript API

Note

Since Version 3.0, all the PhoneGap APIs have been converted to plugins, which means having a deep understanding of the plugins is now even more important for a PhoneGap developer.

The user interface and the business logic are the app's main source code and are the parts on which most developers concentrate their development efforts. The custom plugins are strictly integrated in the framework and are exposed to the user through JavaScript. PhoneGap provides a callback architecture that allows a developer to design a custom plugin and extend its functionalities. You can imagine a plugin as an additional component of...