Book Image

JavaScript Mobile Application Development

By : Saleh
Book Image

JavaScript Mobile Application Development

By: Saleh

Overview of this book

If you are a native mobile developer, with some familiarity with the common web technologies of JavaScript, CSS, and HTML, or if you are a web developer, then this learning guide will add great value and impact to your work. Learning how to develop mobile applications using Apache Cordova is of particular importance if you are looking to develop applications on a variety of different platforms efficiently.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)
9
Index

What is Apache Cordova?

The Apache Cordova project is an Apache open source project that targets the creation of native mobile applications using common web technologies such as HyperText Markup Language (HTML), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and JavaScript. It offers a set of JavaScript APIs, which provide access to a number of natively built core plugins. Cordova offers many core APIs, some of which grant the ability to perform the following:

  • Process the device contact lists
  • Process files on the device storage
  • Capture a photo using the device camera
  • Get a photo from the device gallery
  • Record voice using the device microphone
  • Get device direction using the device compass
  • Retrieve the device locale
  • Find out the device location
  • Get the device motion
  • Get the device connection information

Cordova supports a wide variety of different mobile platforms such as:

  • Android
  • iOS
  • Windows platform:
    • Windows Phone 7 (this support will be removed soon in Cordova Version 3.7)
    • Windows Phone 8
    • Windows 8
  • BlackBerry
  • Tizen
  • Web OS
  • Firefox OS
  • Bada
  • Ubuntu

The Apache Cordova official API documentation is at http://docs.cordova.io.

You can also refer to the following GitHub repositories to find the source code of Apache Cordova implementations on the different platforms:

You will find it very useful to know about GitHub, which is a web-based hosting service for software development projects that use the Git revision control system. GitHub offers both paid plans for private repositories and free accounts for open source projects. The site was launched in 2008 by Tom Preston-Werner, Chris Wanstrath, and PJ Hyett.