For developers who have an understanding of how to use the Cordova CLI and make use of plugins, there are a few things you may want to consider researching next to build better, more performant Cordova applications.
Best Practices
1) SPA Is Your Friend
First and foremost - your Cordova applications should adopt the SPA (Single Page Application) design. Loosely defined, a SPA is a client-side application that is run from one request of a web page. The user loads an initial set of resources (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) and further updates (showing a new view, loading data) is done via AJAX. SPAs are commonly used for more complex client-side applications.
Example : GMail is a great example of this.
Examples of SPA libraries you can use in your Cordova applications are:
And many, many, more.
2) Performance Considerations
One of the biggest mistakes a new Cordova developer can make is to assume that the performance they get on a desktop machine is the same they will get on a mobile device. While our mobile devices have gotten more powerful every year, they still lack the power and performance of a desktop. Mobile devices typically have much less RAM and a GPU that is a far cry from their desktop (or even laptop) brethren.
1.Click versus Touch
2.CSS Transitions versus DOM Manipulation
3.Networks Suck
3) Recognize and Handle Offline Status
Not only can you be on a slow network, it is entirely possible for your application to be completely offline.
Handling Upgrades
1)Upgrading Cordova Projects
If your existing project was created using Cordova 3.x, you can upgrade the project by issuing the following:
cordova platform update platform-name ios, android, etc.
2)Plugin Upgrades
cordova plugin rm com.some.plugin
cordova plugin add com.some.plugin
User Interface
Building a Cordova application that looks nice on mobile can be a challenge, especially for developers. Many people chose to use a UI framework to make this easier. Here is a short list of options you may want to consider.
- jQuery Mobile - jQuery Mobile automatically enhances your layout for mobile optimization. It also handles creating a SPA for you automatically.
- ionic - This powerful UI framework actually has its own CLI to handle project creation.
- Ratchet - Brought to you by the people who created Bootstrap.
- Kendo UI - Open source UI and application framework from Telerik.
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