Building on the cloud: Easy way to go native with mobl

In the tutorial Going native shows how to make a native app for IOS in mobl using Phonegap. This tutorial shows how to use the integrated option in mobl plugin to generate a native app for multiple platforms on the cloud service of Phonegap.

Advantages

There are several advantages for making native apps:

  • Deploy to the app stores and market places. These provide exposure to your application, and make it easier to monetize.
  • Access to more APIs. Mobl's Phonegap API wrappers give you access to the phone's contact list, camera and many other APIs.

Normally it takes a lot of effort (and in some cases also specific hardware), to get the app native. The option for using a cloud delivers also the following advantages:

  • No need for other infrastructure then mobl to create native apps.
  • Multiple platforms support( all platforms are available however this doesn't mean that they are supported and tested for mobl)
  • Only need one button push to build the apps.

Requirements

Settings

For using the cloud it is needed to set some settings. In your project create a config file and add the following code block.

native {
    username "[email protected]"
    password "password"
    platforms android, ios
}

Where the username and password are the username and password of Phonegap and platforms you need to give a comma separated list of platforms wherefore you want a native app to be created.

Current valid platforms are:

android, blackberry, symbian, webos, ios

Building app

Open the mobl file that needs to be build. Then open the Transform menu and select "native build".

This will generate code, uploads it to the cloud and download the app when ready. To find the downloaded app look into the folder: native/'platform'/

Cloud Service

The cloud delivers a lot of options that are not build into mobl but can be configured through the web interface of Phonegap. Take into consideration that the cloud is not part of mobl and therefore mobl is not responsible for what Phonegap does with the code.

tutorial/nativebuild.txt · Last modified: 2013/10/01 02:29 (external edit)