Chapter 16
Building with Web App Frameworks
WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER:
- Exploring the jQuery Mobile frameworks
- Using iWebKit to create a web app
When the iPhone was first introduced, you had few options for creating web apps for Apple’s mobile device. You could use the original iUI .js library, or you could create everything from scratch. In the words of S.E. Hinton, that was then, and this is now. Today, you have a plethora of options available to you — not only for creating apps for iPhone and iPad, but also for creating them for Android.
In this chapter, I highlight two of the frameworks — jQuery Mobile and iWebKit — both of which provide great alternatives for web developers. I focus on these two for their ease of use, consistency with standard web conventions, and because they offer two different approaches to IOS support. jQueryMobile is focused on providing cross-platform mobile solutions, so it doesn’t attempt to emulate the native IOS look and feel with its theming options. (However, I also introduce you to an open-source template that does just that.)
iWebKit, on the other hand, takes an opposite approach. Much like the updated iUI framework covered in Chapter 9, iWebKit focuses on providing a native-looking IOS experience for web apps. Based on your app needs, you can decide which makes the most sense for you.
As part of the comparison, I create a basic navigation-based app with each framework to help illustrate how you can utilize each framework for a common ...
