Chapter 3
Building Mobile Web Apps
WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER:
- Building mobile web apps that look like native apps
- Using device geolocation to find a user’s location
- Detecting the orientation of the mobile device screen
- Installing mobile web apps on the iPhone and Android home screens
- Using the jQuery JavaScript library
- Using the jQuery Mobile JavaScript library
- Building a to-do list mobile web app that provides the same user experience as a native app
You are now ready to learn the details of mobile web app development. In Chapter 2, as you built a working sample application, I asked you to accept some of the details on trust. This chapter goes into those details and shows you how to build a mobile web app from the ground up. First, you will see how to access some mobile device functions, such as location detection, from within your app. Then you’ll be introduced to the jQuery Mobile library, which makes mobile web app development much easier. Finally, this chapter shows you how to build a fully working, cross-platform to-do list app with offline storage. At the end of this chapter, you will have this app installed on the home screen of your phone, and it will have the appearance and behavior of a native app.
WHAT YOU CAN DO WITH MOBILE WEB APPS
Mobile web apps are just web pages. You access them on your device, using a standard device web browser. In many cases, your experience with a mobile web app can be as good as your experience with the native installed app. ...
