Programming the Mobile Web

Chapter 4. Setting Up Your Environment

Unlike desktop web development, where you’re likely to create and test your work on the same device, mobile development generally requires creating and managing several development environments.

Setting Up a Development Environment

Before starting our mobile web markup work, let’s take a look at some of the best tools, IDEs, and emulators available for our use. In Chapter 13, we’ll take a deeper look at testing and debugging and cover advanced techniques and tools.

Working with Code

For coding our markup, JavaScript, and CSS, we can use almost any web tool available in the market, including Adobe Dreamweaver, Microsoft Expression Web, Aptana Studio, or even a text editor. Some tools, like Dreamweaver (since the CS4 version), work better with mobile markup and allow us to validate against mobile web standards. In this editor, when we create a new document we can choose XHTML Mobile as the document type, as shown in Figure 4-1.

Figure 4-1. Dreamweaver allows us to define new files as XHTML Mobile documents. It is better not to use the layout templates.

We will see in the following pages that it may be useful not to use too many of an editor’s visual design features. In mobile web development, it is often easier and cleaner to work directly with the code.

Emulators and Simulators

The most useful tools for our work will be emulators and simulators. Generally ...