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

Native, web, and hybrid apps


There is an ongoing debate among developers about the pros and cons of native, web, and hybrid apps. The truth is that each development approach has different points of strength.

Native apps are marked by better performance, snappier animations and transitions, and faster load times. Furthermore, native apps can store more data offline and have full access to a device's hardware and OS features. Typically native apps are more expensive to build and the build costs increase significantly for each new platform because the code base needs to be reworked for each OS.

Web apps are built using web standards, so it's possible to have a common code base for all the supported devices and it's much easier to find developers with the appropriate skills.

On the con side, a web app is not able to access the entire device's hardware and OS features and is not installed on the user device, which means that users cannot access it when the device is not online.

A hybrid app can be...