AZcode

As I mentioned in the original article, toolkits like PhoneGap and jQTouch already exist and can help ease some of the pain that mobile web app developers experience when trying to build native-quality web apps for the iPhone. However, numerous problems continue to make this impractical for many. For example, MobileSafari’s lack of support for fixed position CSS elements, overall responsiveness, access to certain important hardware features, and mostly, missing native _feeling_ behaviors. In many — perhaps most — cases, struggles with these problems ultimately force serious app developers to pursue a native client approach, even though it comes with an expensive learning curve and of course the problem that it’s an app-specific interface that needs to be maintained in addition to an existing web presence.

So, if you are a php developer who has never bothered to look over the fence at client-side coding practices, this book is ideally for you. If you are a JavaScript developer looking to learn a thing or two about PHP you might be frustrated as the author assumes you are already “good” at php development. Because of this assumption made by the author, very little insight into the php code is given. But, to the author’s credit, he warns us about this fact upfront.