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

Performance best-practices


The success of any mobile web application relies on design and performance. An entire book could be written about performance best practices especially when dealing with mobile web and native apps. However, there are some fundamentals that are important to review, because with PhoneGap you are actually working with a browser instance embedded in a native app.

When possible use small images to render the UI elements of your app. A very good approach is the one you can see in action when opening Gmail that uses small GIF files combined to render the user interface, ensuring a very short processing time. The images are not rendered directly in the UI; instead they are combined using different CSS rules. Furthermore, the images are usually grouped together and then rendered using a technique known as CSS Sprites.

Generally speaking, inline CSS and JavaScript are less expensive for the device, but they are not good practice at all. You can use the server to inject in...