Book Image

jQuery Mobile Web Development Essentials-Third Edition - Third Edition

By : Raymond Camden, Andy Matthews
Book Image

jQuery Mobile Web Development Essentials-Third Edition - Third Edition

By: Raymond Camden, Andy Matthews

Overview of this book

jQuery Mobile is a HTML5-based touch-optimized web framework. jQuery Mobile can be used to build responsive cross-platform websites and apps for a wide range of smartphones, tablets, and desktop devices. The jQuery Mobile framework can be integrated with other mobile app frameworks such as PhoneGap, IBM Worklight, and more. Introduction to jQuery Mobile explains how to add the framework to your HTML pages to create rich, mobile-optimized web pages with minimal effort. You’ll learn how to use jQuery Mobile’s automatic enhancements and configure the framework for customized, powerful mobile-friendly websites. We then dig into forms, events, and styling. You'll see how jQuery Mobile automatically enhances content, and will find out how to use the JavaScript API to build complex sites. We’ll introduce you to how jQuery Mobile can be themed as well looking into how JavaScript can be used for deep sets of customizations. The examples are ready to run and can be used to help kick-start your own site. Along the way, you will leverage all the concepts you learn to build three sample mobile applications.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
jQuery Mobile Web Development Essentials Third Edition
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Getting jQuery Mobile


In the preface, we talked about how jQuery Mobile is just a set of files. This wasn't said to minimize the amount of work done to create those files or to play down how powerful they are, but to emphasize that using jQuery Mobile means that you don't have to install any special tools or server. You can download the files and simply include them in your page. And if that's too much work, you have an even simpler solution. jQuery Mobile's files are hosted on a Content Delivery Network (CDN). This is a resource hosted by them and it is guaranteed (as much as anything like this can be) to be online and available. Multiple websites are already using these CDN hosted files. This means that when users hit your website, they may already have the resources in their cache. For this book, we will be making use of the CDN hosted files. Just for this first example, we'll download the ZIP file and extract the files we need.

Tip

I recommend doing this anyway for the times when you're on an airplane and wanting to whip up a quick mobile website.

To grab the files, visit http://jquerymobile.com/download. There are a few options here, but you want the ZIP file option. Go ahead and download the ZIP file and extract it (the ZIP file you downloaded earlier from GitHub has a copy already). The following screenshot demonstrates what you should see after extracting the content from the ZIP file:

Note

An important note: at the time this book was written, jQuery Mobile was at version 1.4.5. Obviously, by the time you read this book, a later version may be released. The filenames you see listed in the previous screenshot are version-specific, so keep in mind that they may look a bit different for you.

The ZIP file contains demos and both the minified and regular versions of the jQuery Mobile framework. Additional files are provided for theming and other purposes, but your main concern will be with jquery.mobile-1.4.5.min.css and jquery.mobile-1.4.5.min.js. You will typically want to use the minified version in your production apps though. The images folder contains various images used by jQuery Mobile's CSS file. Of course, you also need to include the jQuery library.

Note

You can download this separately at http://www.jquery.com.