Cordova Overview

Cordova is a platform for building hybrid mobile applications using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. /b10> The official documentation gives us a definition of Cordova.

"Apache Cordova is an open source mobile development framework that allows you to use standard Web technologies such as HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript for cross-platform development, avoiding the local development language for each mobile platform. A pplications are executed in a package for each platform and rely on standard API bindings to access the sensor, data, and network state of each device. "

Cordova features

• Command Line Interface (Cordova CLI)

  This is a tool that can be used to start projects, build processes on different platforms, install plug-ins, and many other useful things to make the development process easier. /b10> You'll learn how to use it in a later chapter.

• Cordova core components

  Cordova provides the core components required for each mobile application. /b10> These components will be used to create the basis of the application, so we can spend more time implementing our own logic.

• Cordova external program

  The API provided by Cordova will be used to implement local mobile functionality to our JavaScript application.

• License

  Cordova is licensed under Apache License 2.0. /b10> The Apache and Apache feather logos are trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation.

Cordova's strengths

• Cordova provides a platform for building hybrid mobile applications, so we can develop an app that will be used on different mobile platforms IOS, Android, Windows Phone, Amazon-Fireos, BlackBerry, Firefox OS, Ubuntu and Tizien.

• Developing hybrid applications and then native applications is faster, so Cordova can save a lot of development time

• Because we use JavaScript when using Cordova, we don't need to learn platform-specific programming languages.

• There are a number of community plug-ins that can be used with Cordova. /b10> Many libraries and frameworks are optimized to use it.

Cordova restrictions

• Hybrid applications are slower than on-premises applications, so using Cordova is not the best choice for large applications that require a lot of data and functionality.

• Cross-browser compatibility can cause a lot of problems. /b10> Most of the time, we build applications for different platforms, so testing and optimization can take a lot of time because we need to cover a large number of devices and operating systems.

• Some plug-ins have compatibility issues with different devices and platforms. /b10> There are also some this API that Cordova does not yet support.