Introduction
Introduction
The Apple App Store made its debut on July on the iPhone 2 and has not looked back since1. To say that the App Store has been a success is an understatement. As of the date of writing this book the Apple App Store has a record 800 000 apps available for download. The concept of an “App” and an “App Store” has now been adopted by a plethora of platforms including, Google (Google Play), Amazon (Amazon Appstore for Android), Microsoft (Windows Store), Firefox (Firefox Marketplace), Chrome (Chrome Web Store) and a host of other platforms. It seems like every device today has an app Store and for every task out there, there’s an App for that.
In this book we will learn how to create Android WebView Apps. The aim is to show a novice how to develop simple Web apps for mobile devices. Before you can develop apps you’ll need to know some basics web technologies. Your app will consist of 3 main components, HTML5, CSS and Javascript. HTML5 is used for presentation, CSS is used for styling and Javascript is used to code the actual functionality of your app.
HTML5
HTML5 (HyperText Markup Language 5) will be used to create all the visual elements of your app.
DOM
The DOM (Document Object Model) is an object representation of the elements that make up your app. It is organized as a tree. Every web app consists of a DOM and the functionality of your app usually involves manipulating the DOM.
We will discuss the aforementioned technologies later on in this book.
Native Apps versus Web Apps
Native apps are written specifically for the platform on which they run on. They take advantage of the platform’s native user interface elements. Web apps on the other hand are developed using web technologies, can be viewed in a browser and can usually work on any platform with a compliant browser.