Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
if you are building an application that you know will be used in areas where there is no
data coverage whatsoever? What if you know your application is really resource heavy
and contains a lot of audio files or images that you do not want to sit around and wait to
load onto a device? What if your project is so awesome that you don't want to give it away
for free and want to sell it to your users instead? Well, do not fret because we have
solutions for you to turn that incredible HTML5 and JavaScript application into a full-
fledge native application that can be run on your users' phones without the need to ever
open their Internet browsers.
On top of that, going the native route opens up many avenues to you that were not
available beforehand by giving you access to many of your handset's features (such as
accessing the handset's contacts, or creating a game that makes use of the phone's or
tablet's accelerometer, or creating files on the handset's file system). These are features
you normally are not allowed to access when going through a standard web browser,
and for good reason too! If anyone was able to modify your computer's, tablet's, or
phone's file system from the Internet, it would be mass hysteria all around the planet. If
you think the computer world has problems with viruses and trojans now, imagine how it
would be if you visited
Amazon.com
and an angry rogue developer decided to use his file
system access rights to delete all the files on your computer? Yeah, I told you, mass
hysteria. This is why your browser is locked down as we discussed when creating our
Twitter applications "Who'sThat Tweet?" and "I Love Ham.”
There are times, though, when this access is needed, and that is where frameworks like
come into play. Both of these application frameworks let developers take their existing
HTML5 and JavaScript code and turn it into a full-fledged application that can be
uploaded to any mobile application store of your choosing. While both of these products
allow you take your application down the native path, they each do it in pretty different
ways that I feel are worth mentioning.
PhoneGap
PhoneGap is a free and open source solution, like many popular web development
solutions, which has come a long way in a very short timeframe. Created by Nitobi
Software during a 48 hour coding spree at iPhone Dev Camp in 2009, PhoneGap came
into existence and has been a fan favorite of web developers looking to hop into the
mobile development scene without spending a lot of time learning a new programming
language.
With the recent release of Adobe Dreamweaver CS5.5, Adobe has integrated the
PhoneGap framework into Dreamweaver so a developer can create a native application,
and test it in an Android emulator, with just a simple click of the mouse (see Figure 13-23).
This partnership with such a massive development powerhouse gives PhoneGap a huge
advantage over its competitors in the “write once run anywhere” mobile space.
