Book Image

Creating Mobile Apps with Appcelerator Titanium

By : Christian Brousseau
Book Image

Creating Mobile Apps with Appcelerator Titanium

By: Christian Brousseau

Overview of this book

Smartphones and tablets have really changed the technological landscape over the last 3-4 years. Much like the web did in the last decade, these powerful tools have changed the way people communicate and access information. Such a wide market creates opportunities for developers who have the skills to develop mobile applications. "Creating Mobile Apps with Appcelerator Titanium" is a practical, step-by-step guide to building iPhone, iPad, and Android applications using JavaScript. This book will give you a solid grounding of the dos and don'ts of mobile development and also covers a lot of the functionalities offered by the Titanium platform. This book begins with a look at what the Titanium platform has to offer. By taking you through clear tutorials on developing each application step-by-step, it helps you to apply your newly acquired knowledge afterwards. The difficulty level gradually increases along the course of the book. Each application from this book covers different aspects of mobile development. Every chapter starts by defining the application's features as well as the user interface structure. Every single code section is then explained and put into context allowing you to gain a clear understanding of their purpose and functionality. The book takes a “small milestone” approach, allowing you to actually run the application and see the progression. Every step is accompanied by many screenshots so you can see the expected result on screen. You will learn everything you need to know to develop your very own mobile applications. The book takes a laid-back approach to Titanium development and provides information in a way designed to never overwhelm the reader with information and also uses clear diagrams, screenshots, and tips throughout.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Creating Mobile Apps with Appcelerator Titanium
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Node.js


Node.js is a software platform that is used to develop (usually) server-side applications. It is built on Google Chrome's JavaScript runtime; therefore, developers can use JavaScript on the server. It is also important to mention that it uses a single-threaded event loop and nonblocking I/O, which provides very high performance. It can be downloaded for free from the official website at http://nodejs.org.

NPM

Node Package Manager (NPM), just as its name implies, is the predominant package manager for the Node.js platform. There were more than 38,000 packages available in the npm registry (https://npmjs.org) at the time of writing this book. It comes bundled with the Node.js installation, so no operation is needed in order to use it.

Socket.IO

Socket.IO is a JavaScript library for real-time web applications. It has both a server component as well as a client component. It then uses the web socket protocol for communication. This means that it relies on events instead of always soliciting the server to check whether it has some new information available.

It can be installed using the npm tool, making it easy to be set up.