Blank Intel XDK and Apache Cordova Project

See LICENSE.md for license terms and conditions.

Project File Information

The icon.png and screenshot.png files are not required by your project. They are included for use by the Intel XDK template/demo panel and have no use within a real app. You can safely delete them from your project directory.

The cordova.js script is needed to provide your app with access to Cordova APIs. To add Cordova APIs to your application you must add the corresponding Cordova plugins. See the Plugins section on the Projects tab.

Project Details

Use this project as a starting point for an Intel XDK or Apache Cordova hybrid mobile app. One key file (init-dev.js) contains the initialization code needed to manage the "ready" event. This file manages the Cordova "deviceready" event and the standard browser "documentready" event init events in a way that allows you to run your app in either a Cordova or web app environment. This init code works:

• within the the Intel XDK Simulate tab (and old Emulate tab)

• in the Intel XDK App Preview application (Test tab)

• when you run your app inside a standard Browser

• in an app built using Apache Cordova (aka Cordova CLI) of PhoneGap

When init-dev.js completes execution it issues a custom app.Ready event. Use this event to start your application, rather than waiting on "deviceready" or "documentready" or "windowload" or similar events. You should not have to modify anything in init-dev.js to use this code. Also, init-dev.js has been written so that it is not dependent on any external libraries or specific webviews. It has been tested with the following webviews and browsers:

• Android 2.3, 4.0-4.3, 4.4, 5.x, 6.x and 7.x

• iOS 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10

• Windows 8 Phone, Windows 8.x and Windows 10

• Crosswalk

• Chrome Desktop Browser

• Internet Explorer 10 and 11 and Microsoft Edge

This blank project works well for converting an existing web app into a hybrid app. One of the biggest issues encountered when porting a web app to a hybrid app is resolving the init sequence of the web app with the init sequence required of a hybrid HTML5 app. This gets especially difficult when large third-party libraries are part of the app. Due to the additional burden of initializing the underlying native code layer, developers sometimes have trouble getting their code that runs in a desktop browser to initialize in an HTML5 hybrid webview. Frequently this is due to the significant difference in resources between the desktop browser and the mobile webview (e.g., less memory, lower performance and a reduced feature set).

There are many comments in the files in this project. Please read those comments for details and further documentation. In particular, see the comments in the index.html file for recommendations on how to load your third-party libraries relative to your application code and the special Cordova library.

There are a large number of console.log() messages contained within init-dev.js. They can be used to debug initialization problems and understand how the file works. It is highly recommended that you leave those console.log() messages in that file, they will not unduly slow down or burden your application. Set dev.LOG = true to enable the console.log() messages in init-dev.js and set it to false for release code, it is normally set to false.

BTW: the "dev” prefix refers to "device" in this context, not "develop," because it grew out of a desire to build a more reliable and flexible "device ready" detector.