How to Build a Mobile Application: PhoneGap

How to Build a Mobile Application: PhoneGap

Today we are going to discuss one of the ways to build a mobile app. In previous article, I have explained how to build an app with native iOS. PhoneGap is an open source framework that allows you to use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to build mobile apps for multiple platforms. It supports a wide variety of platforms: Android, iOS, BlackBerry, Windows Phone 7and 8, webOS, Symbian, and Bada.

Adobe’s PhoneGap platform helps create an app that runs on different mobile devices. PhoneGap’s development tools combines the HTML, CSS and JavaScript files into platform-specific deployment packages.

For this article, we’ll take a sample FasTip application running on iOS and Android: It uses a mobile platform’s Web view to display content. As such, the content will appear nearly the same on each platform.

Plugins: Closing the Gap on Native Features PhoneGap bundles a Web view of your HTML, CSS and JavaScript in a native application. As Web view in an application does not support many device features, such as access to the file system or the camera.

PhoneGap uses a mechanism that allows JavaScript running in the Web view to invoke native code contained in the application.

PhoneGap include plugins to support device capabilities such as the following:      

accelerometer camera contacts file system media playback and recording network availability

Plugins may be extended to allow people access more features      

barcode scanning Bluetooth push notifications text to speech calendars Facebook Connect

You can use command line tools which make it easy to add plugins to the repository for your project.

An HTML, CSS and JavaScript Foundation for Mobile Development The major capabilities lie in non-visual components — things that access the file system, network availability, geolocation, etc. Applications

written for mobile browsers must face the limitations of the given mobile platform (processing speed, screen size, network speed, touch events, etc.).

Here are some mobile frameworks that help you with this – jQuery Mobile Ionic Sencha Touch Kendo UI Complete AppGyver’s Steroids Enyo TopCoat Getting Our Project Into PhoneGap PhoneGap provides a command-line tool, named Cordova, to set up a new project, build an application, run the application and install plugins.

STEP 1 To create our application, navigate to an empty directory and use the createcommand: $ cordova create fastip org.traeg.fastip FastTip This command will create a subdirectory, named fastip, to hold our application files and to establish a new application named FasTip, with an org.traeg.fastipnamespace.

STEP 2 Switch to the fastip directory that PhoneGap has just created from the command above.

STEP 3 We’ll need to tell PhoneGap which platforms we want this app to run on. We’re supporting iOS and Android, so run the following two commands to support them: $ cordova platform add ios $ cordova platform add android STEP 4 We can test our project to see whether PhoneGap has been properly initialized: $ cordova build ios $ cordova emulate ios STEP 5 The next time the cordova build command is executed, the application’s content will be copied to the respective platform directories, and the application will be run with that new content.

Hope this article help you develop mobile applications for multiple platforms.

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