HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
2
Chapter
An Introduction to
Creating Mobile Web
Apps for Android
Now that your development environment has been set up, you must be itching
to dive into some code!
Before you begin, this chapter will take you through the basic principles of the
mobile web compared to the much more traditional desktop environment.
Life would be so much simpler if you could build and deploy an application once
and make it instantly available on all devices (not just Android). The mobile web
aims to solve this. Native applications have their advantages, and they come
into their own when they require large amounts of graphics processing, CPU,
and RAM, as well as access to almost all aspects of the Android operating
system.
Browser vendors such as Mozilla are attempting to change this and tip the
balance in favor of web standards. By leveraging Android's native APIs, and
making them available to the web developer through JavaScript APIs within the
browser, we can potentially tap into the same APIs available to native
application developers in the very near future. In the meantime, the introduction
of HTML5 to mobile devices is helping to fill the gap while we wait, and provide
a solid base to build upon. Multiple phone web-based application frameworks,
