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

Development tools


As mentioned in Chapter 1, Getting Started with PhoneGap, you can work either with Eclipse, Xcode or Visual Studio. Each tool has its pros and cons. However, if you would like to create some custom plugins for your apps, you may want to consider using all of them.

One of the main advantages of Apache Cordova and its PhoneGap distribution is that you can build mobile applications in the browser using web standards and well-known technologies. This is the reason why you can use either a text editor or an integrated development environment (IDE) when working on PhoneGap apps; most of the time you will work on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. The difference between a text editor and an IDE is that an IDE understands the programming language, whereas a text editor understands text. Depending on the task at hand, some developers prefer to work with an editor rather than an IDE.

Let's take a look at the main features of some different tools: Sublime Text, IntelliJ IDEA, Adobe Brackets...