How to Organize Phonegap HTML Files

Question

How to Organize Phonegap HTML Files

5.6k Views Asked by Henson At 20 October 2024 at 11:02

I'm using Phonegap to build an iPad app.

The app is supposed to be offline (aside of form submission), so it will have mostly static pages, so I'm going to have lots of HTML files, since I am not using JS MVC / Require JS to minimize the complexity. The more I see it, it's basically a static site wrapped in Phonegap to build an app.

Since I'm gonna have lots and lots of HTML files, it will be a pain to manage changes in (for example) header/footer if I'm not using any templating engine. So far, I'm using Codekit to compile Jade files to HTML, and it works out fine, I'm only using Jade for the layout/block/include feature and HTML compilation.

The one thing I don't quite like of using Jade is if your file has lots of nested HTML tags (for example a complicated form design marked up with Zurb Foundation/Twitter Bootstrap), then suddenly Jade isn't looking so clean anymore.

Somehow I think there has to be a better way to do it, though. Has any of you done a mostly static pages app with Phonegap? Any better suggestion?

Thanks

Original Q&A

There are 5 best solutions below

**TWilly** · Answer 1

I'm using JQuery mobile successfully. I use RazorEngine as a template service and them compile the files down to static html. Jquery Mobile has a nice paging engine that uses ajax to fetch the static html files and then show those on the page, along with a lot of other nice mobile specific features.

**Priya Ranjan Singh** · Answer 2

I use a very standard workflow that is catching huge popularity in web development - Grunt. Grunt does tasks very similar to how Codekit compiles jade, only that Grunt is very stable, has a huge community and supports jade by installing grunt-contrib-jade. It'd integrate with several templating engines.

Grunt might seem to have a learning curve in beginning, however it is a great alternative, open-source and free to use.

Grunt website: http://gruntjs.com/

**T.Baba** · Answer 3

you can use 1 file for all, save the data in sqlite or as variables in JS files. the code should be like this:

<!doctype html>
<html>
<head></head>
<body>
<div id="page1" class="page">...</div>
<div id="page2" class="page">...</div>
<div id="page3" class="page">...</div>
<div id="page4" class="page">...</div>
</body>
</html>

then you can create a function "navigate(page_id)" in the js file:

public function navigate(pageid){
$('page').hide();
if(pageid == 'page1'){
  $('#'+pageid).show();
  // get data and append it in the div.
}
...
}

for sure you can use Jquery Mobile, but it will force you to use a pre-defined template, Personally i don't use it because writing my own template is much better and may give more options.

**Leo Cai** · Answer 4

I would suggest this framework. It's so easy to achieve page navigation, and you don't need to put all your pages into one file, that will make it very hard to read or maintain. This framework allows you separate any of your files(html, js, css) into very small ones so that each file is easy to read and maintain.

It also uses Ajax to get html(pages/partial views), so you can do what you like to with the html.

Our phonegap team have finished some projects based on this framework, and it's very successful. There are demos with source code on that site, which would help you setup your project. You can take a glance at the files structure through the source code.

I would NOT advise jQueryMobile as it's really a pain for phonegap apps. Here are some posts what explain why:

**Niels** · Answer 5

In your post you mentioned you did not use an mvc framework. However I would advise you to look into backbone.js. Backbone is a technology that is often being used in combination with Phonegap. You could use Backbones views to organize your code.

How to Organize Phonegap HTML Files

There are 5 best solutions below

Related Questions in HTML

Related Questions in CORDOVA

Related Questions in PUG

Related Questions in TEMPLATE-ENGINE

Related Questions in CODEKIT

Trending Questions

Popular # Hahtags

Popular Questions