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

Building our application's manifest file


Now that you have studied the security access levels and the types of Firefox OS applications, we can get started with the construction of our app, Clickr. Let's first build the manifest file for our application. Our manifest file is fairly plain and simple since our application type is web and we aren't using any privileged APIs. We will build some fairly complex applications in the next chapters, and hence there will be other additions to their manifest files.

{
  "version": "0.1.0",
  "name": "Clickr",
  "description": "An app to test your tapping speed",
  "launch_path": "/index.html",
  "icons": {
    "16": "/img/icons/icon_16.png",
    "48": "/img/icons/icon_48.png",
    "60": "/img/icons/icon_60.png",
    "128": "/img/icons/icon_128.png"
  },
  "developer": {
    "name": "Tanay Pant, Shubham Oli",
    "url": "http://stockwolf.net"
  },
  "default_locale": "en"
}

This manifest file isn't very different from what we made in our Hello Firefox application...