Preface

The sudden explosion of mobile devices has made mobile apps development one of the hottest career fields for programmers. The global smartphone/tablet market shared by multiple platforms posed a serious question to mobile application developers and companies, as every mobile platform has different development frameworks and programming languages to develop native applications.

How can we achieve WORA (Write Once, Run Anywhere)?

The obvious solution was HTML5, which is supported by all the latest browsers and has great support for developing rich user interfaces. With the introduction of platforms such as PhoneGap, which exposes the native OS APIs to apps developed in HTML5/JavaScript and CSS3, HTML5-based applications became a double-edged sword. They can be developed using one code base and deployed as a mobile website as well as mobile apps which can be installed on different platforms, as opposed to developing native apps which will result in multiple code bases if multiple platforms are targeted. The availability of a large number of web developers in the industry who understand HTML, JavaScript, and CSS added a boost to the shifting direction of mobile apps development towards HTML5. As the demand increased for more and more mobile applications, both in enterprise and consumer areas, different types of HTML5-based development frameworks surfaced and are still surfacing!

Kendo UI Mobile from Telerik is one of the fastest growing HTML5- and jQuery-based cross-browser mobile applications development frameworks. KendoUI Mobile distinguishes itself from other frameworks by providing adaptive native UI rendering out of the box, without any extra coding, and supporting the Kendo base application development framework. While other mobile development frameworks concentrate on the UI part only, Kendo UI provides support for end-to-end, client-side development.

As the world is getting closer to the HTTP protocol, Web APIs (services which are exposed over plain HTTP) are gaining momentum. ASP.NET Web API helps to build powerful Web APIs, which can be consumed by a rich set of clients and is now the number one choice for .NET developers to build RESTful applications.

This book will introduce you to Kendo UI Mobile and will show you how to build an end-to-end mobile app using ASP.NET Web API as the service backend.