In our last post we talked about the advantages of HTML5 and we advanced that it also played an important role in mobile Apps. In this post we are going to talk about how that really works and a tool you can use to make them.
There is something all smartphones have in common, whether they are iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone… and that is that they all have a browser. And not only do they have a browser, in their SDK (Software Development Kit) they a have a web view which is compatible with HTML5. This makes it possible to develop a web application in HTML5 and use a packaging system to transform it into an App we can them deploy to smartphones.
The trick behind everything is that the App is build using HTML5, CSS (Cascading StyleSheet- We will tell you about it in our next post) and JQuery Mobile. JQuery Mobile consists of a series of controls that lay on top of HTML5 and make it look like an app, they are also fully adapted to mobile devices. You can find out more information here: http://jquerymobile.com . As we mentioned in our last post, thanks to Local Storage you can easily store data in your App.
Once we have completed the development of our web application, we can use a system like Adobe’s Phonegap (http://phonegap.com) to wrap it up, compile it, and deploy to different systems. This is explained very well in the following diagram:
PhoneGap allows the compilation of all the systems below simultaneously and without having to use the specific SDK of each system.
In this way we can reach multiple platforms with just one development.
It is important to highlight that to this date, this type of developments do not convey the same level of efficiency and usability as the ones obtained with native code (using the official programming languages of each operating system), but there is no doubt that time wise it is a very valid alternative (it saves having to learn loads of specific languages).
In the next post we will talk about what exactly is CSS.
See you then!
Pablo Clemente Pérez 