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

Chapter 3. Getting Your Hands Dirty – Firefox OS Apps

In this chapter, we will start with an introduction to Firefox OS applications. You will then learn the difference between packaged and hosted applications, and the security access levels of different Firefox OS applications. Next, you will learn how to develop application manifest files for apps. Finally, we will conclude the chapter by building a simple Firefox OS application called Clickr, which checks the tapping speed of the user. We will go through the following topics in brief:

  • Introduction to Firefox OS apps

  • Packaged and hosted applications

  • Security access levels (permissions)

  • Application manifest files

  • Building Clickr: A simple Firefox OS application

  • Installing and running Clickr