Native Mobile Apps

Native apps are developed specifically for a particular mobile device and are installed directly onto the device itself. Users
download the app via app stores such as Apple App Store, Google Play store, etc.

Native apps are built for specific mobile operating system such as Apple iOS or Android OS. An app made for Apple iOS will
not work on Android OS or Windows OS. So if you want your app to work across all major mobile operating systems, you must
build separate apps for each operating system. This means more money and more effort (time, resources).

Before deciding whether to build a native app, you need to know the Pros and Cons of such an approach.

Pros

 They can be used offline, which makes them faster to open and access anytime.
 In some cases, the performance is faster because they store information locally and only synchronise with the server
after the user is done using the app.
 They allow the user to use device-specific hand gestures. Android and iOS are gradually developing different
conventions for interaction, and a native app responds the way its user expects.
 Native apps get the approval of the app store they are intended for, which means most of the time the user can be
assured of improved safety and security of the app.
 They allow direct access to device hardware that is either more difficult or impossible with a mobile app (camera,
accelerometer, etc.)

Cons

 More expensive to develop, especially when the app needs to be compatible with multiple mobile operating systems,
thus multiplying the development costs.
 Cost of app maintenance is higher (especially if this app supports more than one mobile platform).
 Getting the app approved for the various app stores can prove to be long and tedious for the developer
 Use of the app is contingent on the user's willingness to download and install the app onto their mobile device 

Mobile Web Apps

Web Apps are basically internet-enabled applications that are accessible via the mobile device's Web browser. Users don't need
to downloaded and install the app onto mobile device in order to access it.

The app is written as web pages in HTML and CSS, with the interactive parts in Jquery, JavaScript or similar language. Meaning
that single web app can be used on most devices capable of surfing the web, regardless of the operating system they use.

Let's see what the Pros and Con' of a mobile web app.

Pros

 They are instantly accessible to users via a browser across a range of devices (iPhone, Android, Windows, etc.).
 They are much easier to update or maintain by the developer. If you want to change the design or content of a mobile
web app, you simply publish the update to the server and the changes are immediately visible.
 They are much easier for users to discover since their pages can be displayed in search results and listed in common
search engines such as Google or Bing.
 Visitors to your regular website can be automatically sent to the mobile web app when they are on a handheld mobile
device (using device detection).
 Just like a standard website, mobile websites / web app can be developed as database-driven web applications that act
very much like native apps.
 The development is considerably more time and cost-effective than development of a native app, using programming
languages and technologies that are more commonly understood and have a much larger developer base.

Cons

 Mobile Web apps only have limited scope as far as accessing a mobile device's features is concerned (device-specific
hand gestures, sensors, etc.).
 There are so many variations between web browsers and browser versions and phones that it makes it challenging to
develop a stable web-app that runs on all devices without any issues.
 They are not listed in 'App Stores'. So if someone is looking for your app in the app store, they will be unable to
discover it though such means.
 Since there is no regularised quality control system for Web apps, users may not always be guaranteed safety and
security of the app.
 Web apps are unavailable when offline, even as a basic version.
 So, which is better - a native app or a web app? It depends on your end goals. If your goal is to establish a broad mobile
presence, then you should go for a mobile web app.

If your goal is to provide an application that needs to work more like a computer program than a website, rich with interaction,
a native mobile app would be the best choice.

Considering a graduated approach from mobile web app to native app may make sense to many developers wanting to test the
waters, however this may limit the scope of what's intending to be built.

PDA History

 The first PDA, the Organiser, was released in 1984 by Psion, followed by Psion's Series 3, in 1991. The latter
began to resemble the more familiar PDA style, including a full keyboard.
 The term PDA was first used on January 7, 1992 by Apple Computer CEO John Sculley at the Consumer
Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada, referring to the Apple Newton. 
 In 1994, IBM introduced the first PDA with analog cellular phone functionality, the IBM Simon, which can
also be considered the first smartphone.
 Then in 1996, Nokia introduced a PDA with digital cellphone functionality, the 9000 Communicator.
 Another early entrant in this market was Palm, with a line of PDA products which began in March 1996.
Palm would eventually be the dominant vendor of PDAs until the rising popularity of Pocket PC devices in the early
2000s. By mid-2000s most PDAs had morphed into smartphones as classic PDAs without cellular radios were
increasingly becoming uncommon.

Notebook History

 A notebook computer is a term used interchangeably with laptop computers.

 The first notebook computer was introduced in 1981 but they were very expensive and not as versatile as they are
today. IBM and Epsom both placed versions of portable laptops on the market in 1983.
 It wasn't until 1995 when Microsoft introduced their operating system Windows 95 that the world of notebook
computers exploded.
 Some of the improvements that occurred around this time were a better battery that no longer included acid. Power
saving notebook computers were introduced so the life of the battery lasted much longer. They also were now able to hold
more data so they could be used for more concepts at any given time.

History of Smartphones

 The first smartphone, created by IBM, was invented in 1992 and released for purchase in 1994. It was called
the Simon Personal Communicator (SPC). 
 the SPC was equipped with a touch screen as well as the ability to send and receive both emails and faxes. It had a
calendar, address book, and a native appointment scheduler. It even featured standard and predictive stylus input screen
keyboards!
 It wasn’t until the year 2000 that the smartphone was connected with an actual 3G network. In other words, a
mobile communications standard was built to allow portable electronic devices access to the Internet wirelessly.
 In 2007 Steve Jobs and the team at Macworld revealed the very first iPhone.
 In 2010, Microsoft unveiled a replacement for Windows Mobile known as Windows Phone, featuring a new
touchscreen-centric user interface built around flat design and typography
 In 2019, the majority of smartphones released have more than one camera, are waterproof with IP67 and IP68
[
ratings, and unlock using facial recognition or fingerprint scanners.
 The first commercially available smartphone running Android was the HTC Dream, also known as T-Mobile G1,
announced on September 23, 2008.

Evolution of Web Browsers

 1990 – The WorldWideWeb (not to be confused with the World Wide Web) was the first browser
ever created by W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee, then renamed Nexus to differentiate from the actual World Wide
Web. Unlike today, this was the only browser and the only way to access the web.
 1992 – Lynx was a texted-based browser that couldn’t display any graphic content.
 1993 – Mosaic was the first browser to allow images embedded in text making it “the world’s first
most popular browser”.
 1994 – A noticeable improvement to Mosaic came Netscape Navigator.
 1995 – Internet Explorer made its debut as Microsoft’s first web browser.
 1996 – Opera started as a research project in 1994 that finally went public two years later. This was
also arguably the beginning of the browser wars, mainly between IE 3 and Navigator 3 as Internet Explorer inched
ahead with new capabilities.
 2003 – Apple’s Safari browser was released specifically for Macintosh computers instead of
Navigator.
 2004 – Mozilla launched Firefox as Netscape Navigator faded out.
 2007 – Mobile Safari was introduced as Apple’s mobile web browser and continues to dominate the
iOS market.
 2008 – Google Chrome appeared to soon take over the browser market.
 2011 – Opera Mini was released to focus on the fast-growing mobile browser market.
 2015 – Microsoft Edge was born to combat Google.

Evolution of HTML

 HTML stands for “HyperText Markup Language” and is the standard language used to produce web pages and
applications.
 HTML was first presented by Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, in 1989. Berners-Lee originally
created the Web to allow physicists to collaborate and share their work with each other.
 Now it Delivers data from tourist information, online shopping and advertisements, financial data, weather forecasts
and much more to your personal computer.

HTML 1.0
HTML 1.0 was the first version of HTML, used from 1989 to 1994. It was a very limited version and included
only 20 elements. There wasn’t much that could be done with it and therefore most webpages ended up
looking very similar due to the inability to do things such as; alter the page background, determine fonts and
use tables and forms.

HTML 2.0

Created in 1995, this version was a significant improvement to HTML 1.0. “HTML 2.0 becomes the first official
set of standards for HTML — the base standard by which all browsers were measured until HTML 3.2.”
(Bartels, 2011). It was able to support the changing of a page background, text colour, text face, the use of tables
and text boxes etc. It was around this time that W3C (The World Wide Web Consortium) was created — an
organisation which develops web standards. HTML 2.0 also started to support more browsers.

Problems for browsers

After the creation of HTML 2.0, people started wanting to do more with HTML. A company called Netscape
had a browser called ‘Netscape Navigator’, the leading browser during this time, and they began to introduce
new abilities called ‘Netscape extension tags’. Other browsers tried to recreate these tags to keep up with the
current trends, however they were unable to get them to display in the same way. This meant that pages which
were created using Netscape extension tags ended up looking bad in other browsers.

HTML 3.2

In January 1997 HTML 3.2 was endorsed by the W3 Consortium and approved of by many, including
significant browsers such as Netscape and Microsoft. “HTML 3.2 included tables, applets, text flow around
images, subscripts and superscripts.” (W3.org, 1998)
 HTML 4.01

Dave Raggett, co-editor of the HTML 4 specification, at work composing at the keyboard at his home in
Boston. (W3, n.d.)

This version of HTML, created in 1999, included cascading style sheets (css) which allowed aspects such as text,
colour, font and backgrounds to be easily altered. Instead of these aspects being included directly within the
webpage, they are now separated, making it much more trouble-free.

HTML 5

HTML 5 is the current version of HTML which is used. “We’ve come a long way since HTML could barely
handle a simple page layout. HTML5 can be used to write web applications that still work when you’re not
connected to the net; to tell websites where you are physically located; to handle high definition video; and to
deliver extraordinary graphics.” (Marshall, 2017). HTML 5 continues to evolve and is supported by all of the
biggest browsers such as Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer, Opera and Edge.

Evolution of Javascript
Pre-JavaScript Days
Before the mid-1990s, the web was not much of a major force. No primary language, with HTML being the
major means of making web pages.
However in 1995, the National Center of Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) made moves to change this,
they released the world's first popular web browser.
It was called the NCSA Mosaic.
To challenge the NCSA Mosaic, Marc Andreessen brought in a majority of the developers who built NCSA
Mosaic to a company called Netscape.
 At Netscape, the developers built another web browser called Mosaic Netscape without any of the code used
in building NCSA Mosaic.
Mosaic Netscape challenged NCSA Mosaic, and in order to avoid copyright issues the company renamed the
product.
Its new name: Netscape Navigator.
But It lacked a primary programming language. In his terms, the web needed a “glue language.”
To overcome this challenge, Netscape entered into a license agreement with Sun’s Microsystems the owner of
a popular programming language Java.
The “glue language” would not any relation to Java, except a bit of similarity in syntax.

Early Days
 After the development of the prototype, this newly created language was called Mocha.
 A better release was made in September 1995 and a name change was made as well, with the new name being
LiveScript.
 The final name was agreed upon after the beta 3 release in December 1995: the language would be called
JavaScript.
 The name JavaScript, however, did help the language feed on the popularity of the Java programming
language itself.

Adoption and Version Releases

 In the hope of getting adopted by programmers, Netscape passed JavaScript to the European Computer
Manufacturers Association (ECMA) for standardization in 1995.
 This brought about ECMAScript which uses a majority of JavaScript’s original syntax and has served as the
standard for JavaScript ever since. Therefore, ECMAScript could be used in place of JavaScript.
 While the language was being known for client-side development, a server-side implementation of JavaScript
was released in December 1995 and was called Netscape Enterprise Server.
 In 1996, Microsoft developed a JavaScript implementation in ASP and .NET on the Internet Information
Services (IIS) web server and it was named Jscript.
 Jscript served as a reverse-engineered implementation of Netscape’s JavaScript.
 About two years after passing JavaScript to ECMA, the first standard version of JavaScript, ECMAScript 1, was
released in June 1997.
 ECMAScript 2 was released the next year, with minimal changes to the previous version to keep up with the
ISO standard for the language.
 While JavaScript was now beginning to be adopted by programmers, it was difficult building websites for
Netscape Navigator and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
 Programmers intending to build cross-platform websites started having issues with developing such websites
with JavaScript as the browser reacted differently to code for development.
 In December 1999, 18 months after the release of ECMAScript 2, ECMAScript 3 was released with lots of
changes. ECMAScript 3 saw the introduction of the language’s regular expression and exception handling
features.
 Immediately after the release of ECMAScript 3, plans to come up with ECMAScript 4 began in 2000. However,
the whole process died down with the closure of this project confirmed in 2003 after ECMA released an interim
report containing some of the functionality intended for ECMAScript 4.
 In 2005, Eich and Mozilla joined ECMA so as to be able to assist E4X (ECMAScript for XML), which then lead
to a collaboration with Macromedia. Macromedia decided to adopt JavaScript and use E4X in ActionScript 3.
 Later that year, the adoption of JavaScript skyrocketed further after Jesse James Garrett’s paper was released
where he described the technologies JavaScript supported as the backbone for the web, introducing the term Ajax
as a way of building modern websites.
 While ECMAScript 4 was abandoned, the successor to ECMAScript 3 was finally released in December 2009.
This was a decade after the release of ECMAScript 3 and was called ECMAScript 5 and came with lots of new
features including support for the parsing of JSON files.
 In 2013, plans were made for the release of the ECMAScript 6 but just as in the case of ECMAScript 4, the
process slowed down. However, the project did not die out completely as it was released in June 2015.
 ECMAScript 6 was renamed to ECMAScript 2015, and this naming pattern has continued for the latest
releases of the JavaScript standard.
 ECMAScript has further seen the ECMAScript 2016, 2017, and 2018 versions all released in the month of June
of their various years.
 Today, JavaScript is widely adopted as you can barely see any website without its client-side being powered by
JavaScript with big companies like Google and Facebook relying largely on the language.
 As at the time of writing ECMAScript 2018 is the latest version of JavaScript, with new features such as
asynchronous iterators, asynchronous generators, and new regular expression features.

JavaScript Frameworks
 While JavaScript has proven to be a powerful language, it's frameworks have been a key part of its evolution
and popularity.
 In 2000, the first popular JavaScript framework was released. It was called Dynamic HTML (DHTML).
DHTML was used to make basic changes to web pages. The sort of changes you would make with CSS easily
these days. DHTML was released in 2000.
 In 2006, a lot of frameworks and libraries were released. The most popular being jQuery.

 jQuery was created to help developers build sophisticated web pages. This framework is quite powerful,
challenging the issues faced by developers with the subtle differences in browser implementations. jQuery also
abstracted all of the complexity of client-side web development at the same time, making it easy for developers
to learn and use.
 Since the Netscape Livewire Proweb (Enterprise Server) implementation of JavaScript for server-side
development in 1995, no other implementation existed for such purposes until 2009 when Node.js was released.
 Today, Node.js serves as one of the most used server-side development technologies in the world, bring more
dynamism to JavaScript's client-side focused nature.
 In 2010, Backbone was created by Jeremy Ashkenas.
 Single Page Applications have had a huge impact on modern day web applications. Backbone is one
framework that helped push the prominence of SPAs, with Backbone developers being able to build Single Page
Applications easily.
 AngularJS was also created in 201 by Adam Abrons and Misko Hevery. Angular is one framework that helped
bring more popularity to JavaScript, as it provides a complete architecture for front-end applications for its
developers.

 In 2013, Knockout, Meteor, and React came into the limelight. These three frameworks gave JavaScript more
popularity, though React remains the most successful of the three. Owned by Facebook, React has become one
of the most popular JavaScript frameworks ever, boasting a large user community.

S.NO. JAVASCRIPT HTML

JavaScript is a high-level scripting

1 language HTML is a markup language

2 Adds dynamic functionality Provides static content

HTML can’t be embedded inside Javascript can be embedded inside

3 javascript HTML.
 S.NO. JAVASCRIPT HTML

4 Requires js engine to run the code Requires any web browser

5 Used across few major browsers Used in majority of sites

6 Maintained by ECMA TC-39 committee Maintained by w3c and WHATWG

7 ECMA standards w3c and WHATWG standards.

 8. supported by few browsers supported by all browsers