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

Mimicking mobile counterparts


Several years ago I had a conversation with a cool guy working at Opera, Charles McCathieNevile. He told me in mixed English/Italian, "Mobile is tutto casino!" (Mobile is total chaos). This was true in 2004 and it's still just as true today due to the high device fragmentation and difference in screen resolutions.

In order to emulate devices you can use several tools including the ones provided by the major SDK vendors. Usually these tools are time-consuming and sometimes not easy to configure; for this reason, I strongly encourage you to use the web as your development and debugging platform.

One of the greatest advantages to using PhoneGap is that you can use web standards and thus avoid having to continuously test the app in the browser emulator that comes with the SDK of each mobile platform. It doesn't mean that you don't need to emulate the app at all or that you don't have to test it in a real device, but you can safely assume that it's enough to test the...