A relative newcomer to this world of cross-platform development, Worklight has dramatically taken its place within the community. IBM Worklight aims to change the way in which mobile developers think about creating rich functionality in their mobile applications. It does this in a very efficient manner, providing a complete platform for development unlike other cross-platform developers who only offer libraries to do the job.

Development in IBM Worklight is similar to web development, where developers and designers can leverage their existing knowledge of Cascading Style Sheet (CSS), Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), and straightforward JavaScript to manipulate pages and their elements directly, making development more rapid. The IDE works in conjunction with the native SDKs while building an app for Android.

The IDE builds and compiles the Android project and exports it within the same IDE. For iPhone, it generates files for an Xcode project.

In this book, we're going to take an in-depth look at what Worklight has to offer for building rich mobile applications. Let's start by finding out what exactly Worklight brings to the mobile development environment.