Pro iOS and Android Apps for Business: with jQuery Mobile

Book Preface

Anyone who says writing mobile applications is easy probably has never actually done it. Either that or they’ve been focused on a single platform only. If you’re trying to hit multiple platforms, it’s a challenge.

Fortunately, we have a ready-made solution at our disposal—web technologies. The combination of HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and HTTP represents a development platform that you can target, and the result is that your work will largely work across multiple platforms. If you already have skills in this area, having to learn a new technology, be it Objective-C, Java, or C/C++, not to mention the myriad of device APIs that are out there to support, isn’t a particularly attractive concept.

When your boss says, “Hey, we need an app to run on iPhones and iPads,” you can either try to pick up those new technologies (and probably on a tight deadline, as is typical in the business world) or apply the web development skills you already have to get the solution done in record time. That, concisely, is what this book will teach you to do.

The app you write in this way will work on all the Apple-branded devices, plus the vast majority of Android devices and even other platforms that don’t quite have the market share of iOS and Android but that nonetheless represent users whom it’s better not to ignore if you can help it.

Who This Book Is For

This book is designed for experienced web developers who now need to tackle developing mobile apps for iOS, Android, or both, and perhaps even other platforms such as webOS, Blackberry, and Symbian. This book is for you if you already know HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS reasonably well but you don’t want to learn the “native” development model for all the various platforms out there. This book won’t teach you the fundamentals of those web development technologies, but you don’t necessarily have to be an expert in them either to find value here. You don’t need any mobile development experience, though, and that’s the key point: it’s all about web development in this book. The fact you’re creating a mobile app in the end is almost secondary.