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

Exploring JavaScript compression


In computer programming, you refer to the process of removing unnecessary characters from the source code files, and eventually concatenating them, as file compression . When dealing with web standards, you can compress any file type, including HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The main goal of this process is to reduce the file size in order to speed up download time.

One of the benefits of compressing your source code when working with PhoneGap is performance improvement. When dealing with a mobile app, the files are compiled as a single file that eventually loads external data. However, when dealing with an app built using PhoneGap, the files, even if they are stored locally, have to be loaded in the browser (i.e. the WebView ). Smaller files will be executed faster, so the end user will get a better experience with a more responsive user interface.

You may think that what really matters on a mobile device is the memory consumption, and that compression will not...