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

Writing effective JavaScript


There are several resources online, and books that deeply discuss JavaScript best practices and effectiveness. Let's quickly review some practices to keep JavaScript maintainable and to keep the layers of your app strongly separated.

The following figure shows a rough representation of the components that compose a PhoneGap app; the view represents the UI of the app itself.

Loose coupling

It's important to keep HTML, CSS, and JavaScript separated in the app view, because dependencies between presentation and behavior can make the code of the app unmaintainable. This separation is also known as loose coupling of components, and it's achieved when you're able to make changes to a single component without making changes to other components.

Always separate your JavaScript from your HTML markup and be sure to separate JavaScript modules from each other. All JavaScript should be contained within the <script> tags, which ideally point to a linked JavaScript file...