Chapter 1. Building a Mobile Application Using HTML5

The world is going mobile and millions of smart phones are activated daily. As a result, more and more mobile applications are developed for consumers, and enterprise software products are also slowly but steadily joining the revolution. More and more businesses are convinced that in order to sustain, they need to be in the mobile space. You are a web developer and one fine morning your manager tells you, "We now need to focus on the mobile platforms. Get ready!" or you want to develop a mobile app which needs to be deployed to one or more mobile app stores. There are many factors that play a part in choosing the appropriate mobile development platform, such as your development skills, native functionalities, security, offline capability, and support for multiple platforms. In this chapter, we will see different approaches for developing mobile applications and understand why HTML5 is a popular choice for cross-platform development. Then we will have an introduction to Kendo UI Mobile and will go over some design principles for mobile applications.

In this chapter we will cover:

• Native versus hybrid versus mobile websites
• HTML5 and CSS3
• Kendo UI – building cross-browser apps made easy
• Kendo UI Mobile
• HTML5 mobile web application design guidelines