Get Started with Mobile Applications
Contents |
Technologies
JQuery Mobile
JQuery has long been a popular JavaScript library for creating rich, interactive websites and web applications. However, since it was designed primarily for desktop browsers, it does not have many features specifically designed for building mobile web applications. JQuery Mobile is a project that addresses this shortfall. It is a framework built on top of JQuery that provides a range of user interface elements and features for you to use in your mobile applications.
PhoneGap
PhoneGap is an HTML5 application platform that allows you to author native mobile applications with web technologies and get access to APIs and application stores. PhoneGap leverages those web technologies developers already know best: HTML and JavaScript.
RadPHP
RadPHP takes both technologies and make it easy to work with them. It wraps JQuery Mobile features into mobile components, and provides a wizard for PhoneGap. You can create mobile web applications directly from RadPHP, use JQuery Mobile components to create touch-friendly interfaces and PhoneGap components to interact with mobile devices hardware, and deploy your applications for Android or iOS (iPhone and iPad) devices.
PHP
Mobile applications can not include a web server within, so you will usually not use PHP in your mobile applications.
If your users have a working Internet connection in their mobile devices, you can also perform AJAX calls to a web application of your own, which you can develop with RadPHP too.
If you need to use PHP code inside your mobile application, you can take advantage of UseAjax. But you should avoid UseAjax whenever you can, since it will slightly worsen the performance of your application and make it unusable for mobile devices without a working Internet connection.
Development
Pages
When developing mobile applications, each page of the application (you could call them screens) will extend MPage class, as opposed to Page class. MPage was designed specifically to target mobile applications, and it is the only container you should use with them.
Components
RadPHP includes mobile components for you to use with your mobile applications. You will still be able to use some non-mobile components, but you should use mobile version of components whenever you can, and use non-mobile components whenever you have to.