PhoneGap and Zend Studio [Building Mobile Applications]

PhoneGap is a mobile application development framework which allows developers to build mobile applications using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The PhoneGap framework is used to convert these applications into native mobile applications, without having to rewrite the applications in native languages like Objective-C for iOS.

Zend Studio 10 now integrates PhoneGap into the Zend Studio IDE; this enables developers to easily build and test mobile applications without having to depend on external libraries.

For more information on cloud-connected mobile applications using Zend Studio 10; please refer the following documentation page:

http://files.zend.com/help/Zend-Studio-10/zend-studio.htm#cloud_ connect_mobile.htm

Perform the following steps for building your first cloud-connected mobile application:

1.     Choose the Cloud Connected Mobile Project option from the New menu:

2.       In the Project wizard, you will be asked to provide the following details:

‰        Mobile Project Name: Name of the client-side mobile application project

‰        Web Services Project Name: Name of the web services project for the mobile application

‰        Web Services Project Deployment Target: Deployment target for the mobile application (you can choose the previously created phpcloud target here)

3.     In the template selection page, choose Simple Services as it will create a simple project with a client/server-side example as shown in the following screenshot:

4.       Clicking on Finish will create the mobile and web services projects. The user interface designer in the     mobile project lets us easily make changes to the mobile interface as shown in the following screenshot:

5.       Now run the project from the Zend Studio IDE; it should launch a Zend emulator interface as shown in the next screenshot:

What just happened?

We have successfully created our first mobile application using Zend's cloud-connected mobile application projects. In the subsequent sections we will understand how to extend these web services using Zend Framework 2 to build additional functionality into mobile applications.