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Foreword<br />
by Bryce A. Curtis<br />
Everywhere you go, people are using mobile devices to keep in touch with family<br />
and friends, to find a nearby restaurant, or to check the latest news headlines.<br />
Their phones have become an indispensable part of their lives with applications<br />
that bind them closer to each other and the world around them. It’s these applications<br />
that make their phones truly useful. Most users aren’t aware of the underlying<br />
technology used to develop their favorite app or how much time it took to<br />
write. Instead, they view an application in terms of the benefit it provides them.<br />
Therefore, as developers, we are free to select technologies that deliver this benefit<br />
in the most efficient manner.<br />
One technology decision that must be made early on when developing an application<br />
is whether it is to be written using native or web APIs. Depending upon the<br />
application, native APIs may be required to meet the user’s expectations. However,<br />
for most applications, web technologies consisting of HTML 5, JavaScript, and<br />
CSS provide equal user experiences. The advantage of using web APIs is that they<br />
are written using web technologies familiar to many developers, thus providing an<br />
easier and quicker development process. In addition, since web technologies are<br />
standardized, they exhibit fairly consistent behavior across the many different<br />
mobile platforms available today, such as Android and iOS phones and tablets.<br />
One significant difference between native and web applications is that the native<br />
applications provide extensive access to device features such as the camera and<br />
accelerometer, while the web applications are limited to what the device’s web<br />
browser supports. To bridge this gap between native and web, a new type of application<br />
called the hybrid application was created. A hybrid application is written<br />
using the same web technologies—HTML 5, JavaScript, and CSS—but includes<br />
additional code that enables native APIs to be called from JavaScript. It works by<br />
wrapping your web code with a web browser and packaging both together to create<br />
a native application.<br />
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