Mobile Web Development
Working with Code : For coding our markup, JavaScript, and CSS, we can use almost any web tool available on the market, including Adobe Dreamweaver, Microsoft Visual Studio, Eclipse, Aptana Studio, and of course any good text editor, such as Sublime Text, Textmate, WebStorm, or Notepad++.
Adobe Dreamweaver : Since the CS5.5 version, Dreamweaver has worked better with mobile markup and allows us to validate against mobile web standards. When we create a new document we can choose HTML5 as the document type.
Adobe Edge Tools : Adobe offers a group of tools under the name of Edge that help designers and developers to create HTML5 applications such as Edge Code, Edge Reflow, Edge Inspect, and Edge .
Microsoft Visual Studio and WebMatrix : Microsoft IDEs have supported HTML5 syntax and IntelliSense since version 2010 SP1. WebMatrix for mobile web development is available for free.
Eclipse : To use Eclipse as our development environment, there are several plug-ins you can use to create mobile HTML5 apps. Aptana from Titanium, a free Eclipse-based IDE for HTML5 and mobile development can be downloaded as a free version from Aptana’s website.
Native Web IDEs : To target native web or hybrid apps, some platforms offer tools and IDEs that can be used to develop, test, and build the final packages. .
Testing : Emulators are very useful and provide a simple, fast, and fairly accurate testing solution. If it doesn’t work in the emulator, it probably will not work on the real device.
Emulators and Simulators : An emulator is a piece of software that translates compiled code from an original architecture to the platform where it is running. An emulator is a desktop application that emulates mobile device hardware and a mobile operating system, allowing us to test and debug our applications and see the working. The browser, and even the operating system, is not aware that it is running on an emulator.
A simulator is a less complex application that simulates some of the behavior of a device, but does not emulate hardware and does not work over the real operating system. A simulator may be created by the device manufacturer or by some other company offering a simulation environment for developers. In mobile browsing, there are simulators with pixel-level simulation, and others that neither create a skin over a typical desktop browser (such as Firefox, Chrome, or Safari) with real typography nor simulate these browsers’ rendering engines.
For mobile web development, we will find emulators from Nokia, BlackBerry, Android, webOS, and Windows Phone, and simulators from Apple for iOS (though only for Mac OS X). A multiple mobile browser simulator is available from Adobe, called Device Central.
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