Professional Heroku Programming

Chapter 15

Building Mobile Applications with Heroku

WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Understanding mobile development architectures
• Writing an HTML5 mobile application
• Using toolkits and add-ons for mobile application development

WROX.COM CODE DOWNLOADS FOR THIS CHAPTER

The wrox.com code downloads for this chapter are found at www.wrox.com/remtitle.cgi?isbn=1118508998 on the Download Code tab. The code is in the Chapter 15 download and individually named according to the names throughout the chapter.

In previous chapters, you saw examples demonstrating how to write programs in pretty much any language or framework under the sun that will run on a Linux system, and how to deploy them to Heroku. However, we haven’t talked about the different types of apps you can deploy with Heroku. In the decade following the year 2000, smartphones started to become ubiquitous. Later that decade, with the release of Apple’s iPad, tablet computers became all the rage. These changes represented a paradigm shift in the way both consumers and businesses access applications. The traditional desktop or laptop method of delivering apps waned as users increasingly demanded that apps be accessible anywhere and on any device.

Traditionally, many consumers would have both a personal mobile phone and a work phone, often a BlackBerry or similar device. When Apple’s iPhone came along, consumers no longer wanted to carry two devices that served the same purpose, and the era of “bring your own device” was ushered into ...