Chapter 9
Creating Hybrid Apps that Run Natively
WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER:
- Understanding web, hybrid, and native apps
- Understanding the PhoneGap project
- Setting up the iPhone development environment
- Setting up the Android development environment
- Building hybrid iPhone apps
- Building hybrid Android apps
- Accessing device features from JavaScript
- Using the device camera
- Streaming data uploads for efficiency
- Streaming data onto Amazon S3
In this chapter, you will learn how to build apps that you can publish to the Apple App Store and the Android Marketplace. These apps are different from web apps. The user can download these apps as binary packages. It is your job, as a developer, to build this package and upload it to the App Store or Marketplace.
In this chapter, you’ll learn how to create these downloadable apps, using HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. It is not necessary to learn Objective-C or Java. Instead, you can use the open source PhoneGap project, which wraps your web app in a native package. PhoneGap does this by running an embedded version of the WebKit browser inside the native package. This is a standard technique, and many native apps use it to display rich content. Apps that use an embedded WebKit browser for their entire user interface are known as hybrid apps.
You will learn how to set up your development environment to produce hybrid iPhone and Android apps, how to run hybrid apps in a device simulator, and how to deploy hybrid apps to physical devices. You ...
