PhoneGap Essentials

By Turkovic Ivan

If you are a mobile application developer in iOS or Android, or a web application developer who wants to learn how to make cross-platform mobile applications using PhoneGap, this book is perfect for you. To make the most of this book, it will be helpful if you have prior knowledge of HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Release date: Sep 7, 2015
• ISBN: 9781785280061

Book preview

Table of Contents

PhoneGap Essentials

Credits

About the Author

About the Reviewers

www.PacktPub.com

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Why subscribe?

Free access for Packt account holders

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Downloading the example code

Downloading the color images of this book

Errata

Piracy

Questions

1. Get up and Running with PhoneGap

A brief history

What is PhoneGap?

Where can it be used?

What PhoneGap is not

Competition

PhoneGap or Cordova?

Setting up a local development environment

Mac OS

Linux

Windows

Summary

2. Mobile Platform Support

Supported platforms

Supported features by platform

Support for development

PhoneGap Build

Platform support

Using PhoneGap Build

The PhoneGap Developer App

How to use it

Summary

3. Command-line Interface

Introduction to a command-line interface

PhoneGap CLI versus Cordova CLI

Installing the PhoneGap CLI

Creating a new project

Creating a Hello project

Creating a new project

Managing platforms

Adding a platform

Listing platforms

Removing a platform

Keeping platforms up-to-date

Application description

Creating a project from a template

Managing the project

Application preview

Preparing an application

Compiling an application

Building an application

Running an application

Emulating an application

Using PhoneGap Build

Authentication

Preparing the application

Building the application

Summary

4. Plugin Support

Introducing plugins

What is a plugin?

Support for different mobile platforms

Installing plugins

Command-line Interface

Finding plugins

Adding plugins

Listing plugins

Removing plugins

Plugman

Installing Plugman

Searching for plugins

Installing plugins

Removing plugins

npm

Plugins

Battery Status

Camera

Contacts

Device

The Device Motion plugin

Device position orientation

Dialogs

FileSystem

File Transfer

Geolocation

Globalization

InAppBrowser

Media

Media Capture

Network Information

Splashscreen

Vibration

StatusBar

Summary

5. First PhoneGap Application

Starting a new application

Creating a new application

Setting up the initial code

Project folder structure

Core PhoneGap events

The deviceready event

The pause event

The resume event

Essential plugins

The Device plugin

The Network Information plugin

The StatusBar plugin

The Dialogs plugin

Summary

6. Accessing Native APIs

Native APIs

Device status plugins

Motion sensing plugins

Media functionality plugins

Notification plugins

The Battery Status plugin

The Battery Status event

The Low Battery event

The Critical Battery event

The Device Motion plugin

The getCurrentAcceleration method

watchAcceleration

clearWatch

The Device Orientation plugin

getCurrentHeading

watchHeading

clearWatch

The Geolocation plugin

getCurrentPosition

watchPosition

clearWatch

The Position object

The Coordinates object

The Vibration plugin

Vibrate

Standard vibrate

Vibrating with a pattern (Android and Windows only)

Cancelling the vibration (not supported in iOS)

Summary

7. Accessing Media Content

Introducing multimedia

Media

File management

Contacts

File Transfer

The FileTransfer object

The FileUploadResult object

Upload

Download

Abort

Contacts

Contact

The Contact object

ContactName

ContactField

ContactAddress

ContactOrganization

The create method

Find

pickContact

Camera

getPicture

cleanup

InAppBrowser

The InAppBrowser object

The InAppBrowserEvent object

Open

Summary

8. Application Development Workflow

An introduction to a development workflow

Web project development

Native platform development

Best practices

Use local assets for the UI

Network access for data

Non-blocking UI

CSS animations

Click events

Performance

Optimize the image assets

Offline status

Load only what you need

Transparency

JSHint

Testing

Debugging

Desktop browsers

The PhoneGap emulator

Weinre

iOS Debugging

Xcode

Safari Remote Debugging

Android debugging

User interface

Summary

Index

PhoneGap Essentials

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PhoneGap Essentials

Copyright © 2015 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.

Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

First published: September 2015

Production reference: 1310815

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

Livery Place

35 Livery Street

Birmingham B3 2PB, UK.

ISBN 978-1-78528-468-7

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Credits

Author

Ivan Turkovic

Reviewers

Johnathan Iannotti

Yousuf Qureshi

Anthony Rumsey

Kasper Souren

Tomasz Trejderowski

Commissioning Editor

Neil Alexander

Acquisition Editor

Subho Gupta

Content Development Editor

Manasi Pandire

Technical Editor

Bharat Patil

Copy Editors

Stephen Copestake

Tasneem Fatehi

Project Coordinator

Suzanne Coutinho

Proofreader

Safis Editing

Indexer

Mariammal Chettiyar

Production Coordinator

Nilesh R. Mohite

Cover Work

Nilesh R. Mohite

About the Author

Ivan Turkovic is an experienced developer with over 15 years of programming experience. He developed an interest for software development at an early age of 8, when he started to write Basic code on his first Commodore 64 computer. Seeing the potential of what could be done with it encouraged him to pursue his studies in computer science. He has extensive experience of mobile and web application development and has delivered many enterprise and consumer solutions. His favorite languages are Ruby, Swift, and JavaScript. Ivan has always been interested in emerging technologies. In his spare time, when he is not working on another exciting pet project, he is traveling and learning new human languages. He writes his thoughts at http://ivanturkovic.com.

In the past, he has helped found several technology start-ups. As a founder and digital consultant at Blaeg (http://www.blaeg.com), he helps companies, start-ups, and individuals integrate technology into their business and strategies. He also conducts trainings and workshops and writes blogs to share his knowledge with the community.

To my family: thank you for your support and patience with me over the last few months. You won't hear, I am busy; I have a book to write from me anytime soon, promise!

This book is my first attempt at becoming a technical book writer. Writing it has been a fun and exciting experience, but it was also quite harsh on some occasions. There were moments between work and personal issues when I thought I couldn't make it, but here we are! What I want to do now is thank all the wonderful people who have accompanied me on this journey.

About the Reviewers

Johnathan Iannotti is a software engineer and geek on an epic journey of life. His experience spans 15 years of technology solutions for start-ups, financial companies, healthcare, and military industries. He is passionate about web technology and has been creating hybrid apps since their inception. A full-stack developer by trade, he loves UX/UI, frontend development, and mobile.

He works for USAA, creating mobile applications for over 27,000 employees that serve their military membership. He is also a combat veteran, having served almost a decade in the United States Army.

Johnathan spends his time innovating, coding, and making the best of it all. When he's not plugged in, he spends as much time as he can with his beautiful wife and two children, who make it all possible.

You can follow Johnathan on Twitter at @notticode or visit his website, http://www.johnforhire.com/.

Yousuf Qureshi is an early adopter of technology and gadgets and has profound experience in the e-commerce, social media, analytics, and mobile apps sectors. He is a Cloudera Certified Developer for Apache Hadoop (CCDH).

His expertise includes development, technology turnaround, consulting, and architecture. He is also an experienced developer of Android, iOS, Blackberry, ASP.net MVC, Java, MapReduce, Distributed Search and Inverted Index algorithms, Hadoop, Hive, Apache Pig, Media API integration, and multiplatform applications.

Yousuf has also reviewed jQuery Drag and Drop Grids How-To and Monitoring Hadoop for Packt Publishing.

To my (late) grandparents, Abdullah Tanwar and Yasin Khokar.

Anthony Rumsey is a software developer at Adobe with a passion for creating well-designed and engaging user experiences. During his 15-year career, he has focused on the integration of web technologies into Adobe's enterprise software. More recently, his focus has shifted to exploring the capabilities of the mobile web and mobile apps, including contributions to the responsive simulator, touch interface, and PhoneGap integration in Adobe Experience Manager. Anthony happily resides in Ottawa, Canada, with his wife and two children.

Kasper Souren was born in the Netherlands and has been working with Internet technologies across the globe since 1998 for various companies and institutions, including CouchSurfing, Mercedes-Benz, Geekcorps Mali, the Dutch tax authorities, and the biggest Dutch social network. As of 2013, his favorite technology stack is Meteor with CoffeeScript. He's a cofounder of Hitchwiki.org, the ultimate resource for hitchhikers. You can visit his website at http://guaka.org/ and also connect with him on Twitter at @guaka.

Tomasz Trejderowski is a middle-aged developer from Poland with hands-on experience in many programming languages and a wide range of IT aspects. He has been programming computers since the very first Commodore 64, which he received in his youth, and thus poses over 20 years of overall software development experience. You can access repositories and contributions on his GitHub profile and GitHub organizations that he is a part of at https://github.com/trejder.

He is a full-time PhoneGap and Yii2 developer and mobile market entrepreneur, constantly working on many innovative international start-ups and projects. You can visit his company website at http://gaman.pl/ for more details.

Tomasz holds a PhD degree and has authored five books and over 40 articles (mostly in Polish). He is a happy husband of a wonderful wife and the father of two beautiful daughters.

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Preface

When you learn a new programming language, the traditional first step is to go through a Hello, World tutorial that teaches you everything you need to know to get a basic program working, such as one that prints the text Hello, World on the screen. In this sense, this book is the Hello, World tutorial to build your first PhoneGap application.

This book provides you with a great way to get started with PhoneGap and also gives detailed examples from the different areas that PhoneGap covers. It can