Cordova-Tips and Tricks

In this digital age, mobile applications are in vogue, beginning with smartphones and tablets, to smart watches. On the other hand, creating an app for mobile platform individually is daunting with restricted resources, or if you are a single developer. Here Cordova comes into play, wherein, mobile applications can be developed using standard web technologies.  

Cordova, a mobile application development framework is a platform to gather Native Mobile applications using HTML5, CSS and Java Script for cross-platform development. Put simply; it is a basin for joining our web app with native mobile functionalities. As the web applications cannot use built-in mobile functionalities, Cordova is used, as it offers a channel for linking web app and mobile device. By means of Cordova, hybrid mobile apps that can use camera, location, file arrangement and other native mobile tasks can be made. 

To start with, the prerequisites needed to use Cordova are, one should be familiar with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The main features of Cordova are: it has Command line Interface, core components for creating base of the app, it has plugins for native mobile functions implementation and it is licensed under the Apache license.  

When to use Apache Cordova? 

• When developers want to spread out an application across more than one platform. 
• When you want to cultivate a plugin interface between native and Web View components. 

It seems mostly useful; however, there are certain limitations too. Let’s discuss its advantages and limitations to understand it better. 

Advantages of Cordova: 

• Hybrid mobile apps can be built as it offers one platform.  We just need to develop one app that will be used on different mobile platforms. 

• Hybrid app can be built faster as compared to native app saving the development time. 
• No need to learn platform specific programming languages as JavaScript is required. 

Limitations of Cordova: 

• As there are a plethora of devices and platforms, some plugins create compatibility issues.  
• With so many browsers available, it creates issues too wasting a lot of time in testing and optimizing to cover huge number of devices and operating systems.  

• As compared to native apps, hybrid apps are slow, so it is not ideal to use Cordova for big apps that need heaps of data and functionality. 

Cordova – Superlative Practices 

As we all know that, hybrid mobile apps can be created using Cordova, so you need to ponder few things before starting the development. Underneath are the finest practices for Cordova apps progress. 

• Single Page Apps is the suggested scheme for all Cordova apps. This scheme will expand loading speed and complete performance. 
• Mobiles generally use Cordova, hence it is normal to use touch start and touch end actions as an alternative to click actions. In contrast, touch actions are not held on every platform. Ponder this prior to the development. 

• It is recommended to use hardware accelerated CSS Transitions instead of JavaScript animations, as they execute well on mobile devices. 
• Use native scrolling and use loaders when needed. Fit the images perfectly as an alternative of scaling the image. 
• Also, you need to make sure that you test your app on a lot of devices and operating systems. It is not necessary that if app mechanism is perfect on one device, then it will work on some other gadget or platform. 

Conclusion 

Now we are able to determine that Cordova applications fix just like native applications.  App development by means of acquainted technologies decreases development time and the energy needed to form numerous applications for diverse platforms. On the other hand, when building applications, it is suggested that you use current framework, which will help your application come nearer to the built-in look and feel.