Book Image

Learning Firefox OS Application Development

By : Tanay Pant
Book Image

Learning Firefox OS Application Development

By: Tanay Pant

Overview of this book

With broad compatibility, the latest in web technologies, and powerful development tools, Firefox is a great choice for both web developers and end users. Firefox OS’s promotion of HTML5 as a first class citizen opens up the walled gardens of mobile application development for web developers. It is because of this initiative that no special SDKs are required to develop for Firefox OS. This book will help you excel in the art of developing applications for Firefox OS. It sequentially covers knowledge building, skills acquisition, and practical applications. Starting with an introduction to Firefox OS, usage of WebIDE, and then the application structure, this book introduces applications of increasing complexity with each chapter. An application that measures your tapping speed, a geolocation tagging application, and a photo editing and sharing application are the three applications that will be built from scratch. You will learn about topics such as the difference between various types of Firefox OS applications, application manifest files, offline apps, and designing principles for applications. You will also learn to test and submit the applications to the marketplace and finally maintain the repository of the Firefox OS application. By the end, you will be able to develop beautifully designed, fully-fledged, and rigorously tested Firefox OS applications and also share them at the Firefox OS Marketplace.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Learning Firefox OS Application Development
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Introducing WebIDE


It is now time to have a peek at Firefox OS. You can test your applications in two ways: either by running them on a real device, or by running them in Firefox OS Simulator. Let's go ahead with the latter option since you might not have a Firefox OS device yet. We will use WebIDE, which comes preinstalled with Firefox, to accomplish this task.

Note

If you haven't installed Firefox yet, you can do so from https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/.

WebIDE allows you to install one or several runtimes (different versions) together. You can use WebIDE to install different types of application, debug them using Firefox's Developer Tools Suite, and edit the applications/manifest by using the built-in source editor.

After you install Firefox, open WebIDE. You can open it by navigating to Tools | Web Developer | WebIDE. Let's now take a look at the following screenshot of WebIDE:

You will notice that on the top-right of the window, there is a Select Runtime option. When you click...