In this chapter, we will discover the world of Apache Cordova and cover the following topics:
- What Apache Cordova is
- The differences between the different mobile development approaches (mobile web, hybrid mobile, and native mobile applications)
- Why you should use Apache Cordova to develop your mobile applications
- The basics of Apache Cordova architecture
Finally, we will have a quick overview of the current APIs of Apache Cordova 3.
The Apache Cordova project is an Apache open source project that targets the creation of native mobile applications using common web technologies such as HyperText Markup Language (HTML), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and JavaScript. It offers a set of JavaScript APIs, which provide access to a number of natively built core plugins. Cordova offers many core APIs, some of which grant the ability to perform the following:
- Process the device contact lists
- Process files on the device storage
- Capture a photo using the device camera
- Get a photo from the device gallery
- Record voice using the device microphone
- Get device direction using the device compass
- Retrieve the device locale
- Find out the device location
- Get the device motion
- Get the device connection information
Cordova supports a wide variety of different mobile platforms such as:
- Android
- iOS
- Windows platform:
- Windows Phone 7 (this support will be removed soon in Cordova Version 3.7)
- Windows Phone 8
- Windows 8
- BlackBerry
- Tizen
- Web OS
- Firefox OS
- Bada
- Ubuntu
The Apache Cordova official API documentation is at http://docs.cordova.io.
You can also refer to the following GitHub repositories to find the source code of Apache Cordova implementations on the different platforms:
- Cordova for Android (https://github.com/apache/cordova-android)
- Cordova for iOS (https://github.com/apache/cordova-ios)
- Cordova for Windows 8 (https://github.com/apache/cordova-wp8)
- Cordova for BlackBerry (https://github.com/apache/cordova-blackberry)
- Cordova for Tizen (https://github.com/apache/cordova-tizen)
- Cordova for Web OS (https://github.com/apache/cordova-webos)
- Cordova for Firefox OS (https://github.com/apache/cordova-firefoxos)
- Cordova for Bada (https://github.com/apache/cordova-bada)
- Cordova for Ubuntu (https://github.com/apache/cordova-ubuntu)
You will find it very useful to know about GitHub, which is a web-based hosting service for software development projects that use the Git revision control system. GitHub offers both paid plans for private repositories and free accounts for open source projects. The site was launched in 2008 by Tom Preston-Werner, Chris Wanstrath, and PJ Hyett.