Mozilla publicly demonstrated the open source Firefox OS in February 2012. Firefox OS is an initiative by the open source company Mozilla to develop a mobile platform for smartphones as well as a host of other devices, such as tablets and televisions. The reason for rolling out this platform was to provide its users with an operating system that has an alternative that respects the user's privacy and puts security first. Firefox OS devices are a great choice for users who are transitioning from feature phones to smartphones or those who are concerned about privacy. Mozilla is best known for developing pieces of open source software, such as the Firefox web browser, and it doesn't answer its users rather than answering to stakeholders. The aim of Firefox OS is to run on devices that have limited hardware capabilities while still providing a unique and smooth user experience.
Mozilla has a huge community of developers and users, and they are always willing to help others on platforms such as GitHub and IRC (irc.mozilla.org). Firefox OS also has a great marketplace. It has grown over the years and offers great applications. In Firefox OS, HTML5 applications are first-class applications, and so any ordinary web application can be turned into a Firefox OS application in just a few steps. Even the user interface of Firefox OS, which is known as Gecko, has been built with the help of three components, namely HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS3. This makes developing applications easy for people who have already done web development.
Chapter 1, Introduction to Firefox OS, improves your understanding of Firefox OS by teaching its terminology, abstraction layer, and security model.
Chapter 2, Running Firefox OS Simulators with WebIDE, teaches you how to use WebIDE; install, uninstall, and create new applications; and use developer tools for applications running in WebIDE.
Chapter 3, Getting Your Hands Dirty – Firefox OS Apps, introduces the difference between packaged and hosted applications, security access levels of different Firefox OS applications, and developing application manifest files for apps.
Chapter 4, Diving Deeper with the Fox Creating Richer Apps, teaches you how to make hosted Firefox OS applications installable and offline. It then shows you how to apply web APIs to applications.
Chapter 5, Making Applications Visually Appealing – A Style Guide, takes you through the basic designing guidelines. These will help you make applications more user friendly. This chapter also tells you how to avoid some common UI blunders and apply the Gaia building blocks.
Chapter 6, Emerging as a Guru – Learning Web APIs, teaches web APIs, types of web APIs, web activities, and how to use them. This chapter also teaches you to implement all your acquired knowledge to build FoxFoto, a photo editing and sharing application.
Chapter 7, Testing Your Firefox OS Application, covers basic QA and unit testing, using Firefox developer tools for debugging, using the app validator to test applications, and using a spoof Firefox add-on for testing to improve the performance of a Firefox OS application.
Chapter 8, Firefox Marketplace – Setting up Your Bazaar, takes you through the Firefox Marketplace and shows you how to submit and update free and paid applications in the marketplace.
Chapter 9, Maintaining Your Firefox OS Application Code Professionally, takes you through setting up an account on GitHub, version controlling your Firefox OS application, and uploading the local repository to GitHub. It also teaches you how to set up Travis CI for your repository and host applications on RHCloud with the help of Git.
You will need the following:
The latest version of Firefox available
Firefox OS Simulator (2.0)
An Android device running the Firefox web browser (optional)
A device running Firefox OS 2.0 (optional)
This is a practical guide that uses hands-on examples to teach you how to create applications for Firefox OS and also how to port applications to the Firefox Marketplace. This book is intended for developers who want to build applications for Firefox OS. An understanding of HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS is required.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "I have replaced World with Firefox everywhere to make it Hello Firefox."
A block of code is set as follows:
<script src="js/jquery-1.11.3.min.js"></script> <script src="js/bootstrap.min.js"></script> <script src="js/clickr.js"></script>
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "When you click on it, you will see the Install Simulator option."
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