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 6. Emerging a Guru – Learning Web APIs

In this chapter, you will learn about Web APIs, types of Web APIs and how to use them. You will learn to use them with the help of code samples. You will also study web activities, and you will finally implement all of your acquired knowledge to build FoxFoto, a photo editing and sharing application. We will go through the following topics in brief:

  • Web APIs

  • Types of Web API and their usage

  • Web activities

  • Using Web APIs in FoxFoto

This chapter that will take you through the core Web APIs of Firefox OS, has two major parts. In the first part of this chapter, you will study the various core Web APIs, and learn about their implementation and usage in brief. It will also cover various web activities (mozActivities) that are used for some native operations, such as pick, which is used for picking up images from the gallery and videos from SD cards or internal storage.

In the second part of this chapter, you will learn to use these APIs and Web Activities...