Coding Cordova Applications
As mentioned previously, Cordova applications are built using normal, everyday web technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Whatever you want your application to do, if you can make it work using standard web technologies, you can make it work in a Cordova application. Cordova applications can do more than standard web applications, through the specialized JavaScript libraries provided with the framework that I discussed earlier.
The Cordova project doesn’t provide any special editor for writing Cordova applications; you simply need to dig out your web content editor of choice and start coding. To keep things simple, you could use default tools like Notepad on Microsoft Windows or TextEdit on a Macintosh. You could even use something more sophisticated such as Adobe Dreamweaver (www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver.html) or the Eclipse integrated development environment (IDE) (www.eclipse.org).
Adobe, however, offers a free, open-source code editor called Brackets (http://brackets.io) that I’ve been playing around with. It provides a nice, clean interface for coding web applications. As it’s an Adobe product, I expect that you’ll see Cordova and/or PhoneGap integration capabilities in it before long.
For this book, I primarily coded using the open-source Aptana Studio (www.aptana.com), an Eclipse-based IDE tailored for web development. It’s lighter weight than Eclipse and allowed me to easily format the project source code for easy importing into this manuscript (using two spaces instead of tabs everywhere).