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

Understanding the Files API


The PhoneGap Files API is an implementation of two different W3C APIs, the Directories and System API and the File API (you can find the complete specifications on the W3C website at http://www.w3.org/TR/file-system-api/ and http://www.w3.org/TR/file-upload.) The PhoneGap Files API is not a complete implementation of the W3C specification; the missing piece is the synchronous filesystem interface implementation. Asynchronous JavaScript APIs are a bit more complex to use because you have to work with multiple nested functions but this should not be a big issue; in fact it's something web developers are all too familiar with.

Note

The main difference between asynchronous and synchronous JavaScript execution is that in the first case you can run several processes simultaneously and avoid "freezing" the user interface. With the introduction of web workers in JavaScript, it's possible to avoid this issue but this is totally out of the scope for this book; you can find...