Developing Backbone.js Applications

Chapter 12. Backbone and jQuery Mobile

Mobile App Development with jQuery Mobile

The mobile web is huge and it is continuing to grow at an impressive rate. Along with its massive growth comes a striking diversity of devices and browsers. As a result, making your applications cross-platform and mobile-ready is both important and challenging. Creating native apps is expensive. It is very costly in terms of time, and it usually requires varied experiences in programming languages like Objective C , C#, Java, and JavaScript to support multiple runtime environments.

HTML, CSS, and JavaScript enable you to build a single application targeting a common runtime environment: the browser. This approach supports a broad range of mobile devices such as tablets, smartphones, and notebooks along with traditional PCs.

The challenging task is not only to adapt contents like text and pictures properly to various screen resolutions, but also to offer the same user experience across native apps under different operating systems. Like jQueryUI, jQuery Mobile (or jQMobile) is a user interface framework based on jQuery that works across all popular phone, tablet, eReader, and desktop platforms. It is built with accessibility and universal access in mind.

The main idea of the framework is to enable anyone to create a mobile app using only HTML. Knowledge of a programming language is not required and there is no need to write complex, device-specific CSS. For this reason, jQMobile follows two main principles ...