Learn how to Create your first Cordova Project for Android, iOS, Browser, and Desktop using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Apache Cordova is an open-source mobile development framework. It allows you to use standard web technologies such as HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript for cross-platform development, avoiding each mobile platform's native development language. Applications execute within wrappers targeted to each platform, and rely on standards-compliant API bindings to access each device’s sensors, data, and network status.”
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In this blog post, I’ll show you how to Create your first Cordova Project for Android, iOS, Browser, and Desktop using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
By Cross-Platform, we mean that the application codebase can be written once using HTML5, CSS3 & JavaScript and it can be run across multiple target mobile platforms such as Android, iOS, Windows, Firefox, Ubuntu mobile.
The web development community has been continually innovating and with the recent development of frameworks such as Angular, IONIC, jQuery, and React, the traditional web applications have now almost become indistinguishable from their native platform-specific peers in terms of functionality.
Apache Cordova can be extended with native plug-ins, allowing developers to add more functionalities that can be called from JavaScript, making it communicate directly between the native layer and the HTML5 page. These plugins allow access to the device’s accelerometer, camera, compass, file system, microphone, and more.
However, the use of Web-based technologies leads some Apache Cordova applications to run slower than native applications with similar functionality.
And the most important thing is: Cordova is free and open source. Here’s how to get started with Apache Cordova.
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Before creating a new Cordova App, there are few prerequisites and you have to install this software:
*Node.js (npm comes with Node.js) [ https://nodejs.org/en/ ]
*Cordova [after installing node.js, you can install cordova through command line or terminal by using following command “npm install -g cordova“] [ https://cordova.apache.org/#getstarted ]
cordova create DeviceInfo info.androidabcd.deviceinfo DeviceInfoSample
After creating the new app, move to Cordova project folder
cd DeviceInfo
cordova platform add android@latest
cordova plugin add cordova-plugin-device
By using this plugin you get the following device information:
If you haven’t install visual studio code then download and install from here: https://code.visualstudio.com/
You can open the Cordova project from the command line or terminal by typing ” code . ” [code space dot], or you can directly drag & drop the project into visual studio code.
<!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Security-Policy" content="default-src 'self' data: gap: https://ssl.gstatic.com 'unsafe-eval'; style-src 'self' 'unsafe-inline'; media-src *; img-src 'self' data: content:;"> <meta name="format-detection" content="telephone=no"> <meta name="msapplication-tap-highlight" content="no"> <meta name="viewport" content="user-scalable=no, initial-scale=1, maximum-scale=1, minimum-scale=1, width=device-width"> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/index.css"> <title>Devide Info</title> </head> <body> <h2>Device Info</h2> <div style="overflow-x:auto;"> <table> <tr> <td>Cordova Version</td> <td><p id="version"></p></td> </tr> <tr> <td>Device Model</td> <td><p id="model"></p></td> </tr> <tr> <td>Platfrom</td> <td><p id="platform"></p></td> </tr> <tr> <td>UUID</td> <td><p id="uuid"></p></td> </tr> <tr> <td>Android Version</td> <td><p id="androidVersion"></p></td> </tr> <tr> <td>Manufacturer</td> <td><p id="manufacturer"></p></td> </tr> <tr> <td>isVirtual</td> <td><p id="isvirtual"></p></td> </tr> <tr> <td>Serial Number</td> <td><p id="serialNo"></p></td> </tr> </table> </div> <script type="text/javascript" src="cordova.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="js/index.js"></script> </body> </html>
document.addEventListener("deviceready", onDeviceReady, false); function onDeviceReady() { document.getElementById("version").innerHTML = device.cordova; document.getElementById("model").innerHTML = device.model; document.getElementById("platform").innerHTML = device.platform; document.getElementById("uuid").innerHTML = device.uuid; document.getElementById("androidVersion").innerHTML = device.version; document.getElementById("manufacturer").innerHTML = device.manufacturer; document.getElementById("isvirtual").innerHTML = device.isVirtual; document.getElementById("serialNo").innerHTML = device.serial; }
table { border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%; } th, td{ text-align: left; } tr:nth-child(even) {background-color: #f2f2f2;}
After editing the source code in www folder, you must prepare the code, so that it can distribute to all platforms you have added. to prepare the source code type following command in the command line or terminal:
cordova prepare
Once you build your Cordova project, you will notice that it will generate APK File and that you can install it manually in any Android device. Or if you want to install the app using the command line then see the next step.
cordova build android
You have to run Android Emulator before running this command.
cordova run android
How to run an Emulator