What this book covers

Chapter 1, Gear up for the Journey. This chapter is all about setting up the right development environment for iOS, Android, and Blackberry. It covers the detailed step to set up the environment using which we can build and test our application, either on a browser or on an emulator or a real device. The latter half of the chapter covers the Sencha Touch APIs that can be used to detect what device our application is running, what platform the application is running, what features are offered by a platform, how to handle orientation change, and build profiles for different platforms or devices and let our application configure itself using those profiles.

Chapter 2, Catering to your Form Related Needs. This chapter covers every aspect of a form, including the different form fields offered by Sencha Touch, configuring each one of them for the user in a form, and configuring ways by which a typical form validation can be done. Fields such as Search, E-mail, DatePicker, Select, Slider, Checkbox, TextArea, FieldSet, and so on are covered in this chapter along with their detailed usage.

Chapter 3, Containers and Layouts. Containers contain one or more child items, and layouts help us position our content properly on the screen, and this chapter is all about them. It covers what are the different types of containers and layouts available with the framework and their behavior, which is a key point in developing an application where we would have nested containers, each one of them having their own layout to position their children on the screen.

Chapter 4, Building Custom Views. If the components offered by Sencha Touch is not sufficient to achieve the layout and look-n-feel that we are looking for, then custom views is the way to go. In this chapter, we cover Template, XTemplate, and DataView classes of Sencha Touch to see how to build custom views and how to handle events on it to build interactive custom views.

Chapter 5, Dealing with Data and Data Sources. This chapter is all about working with different data sources, storing data on the client side and using it in the most effective way. It shows how to work with the local data source, as well as remote data source. The chapter also covers how to associate data with different components, including form, and validating, filtering, grouping, and sorting data.

Chapter 6, Adding the Components. This chapter covers various other components of Sencha Touch such as Button, ActionSheet, List, IndexBar, NestedList, Picker, Toolbar, and so on. It demonstrates how to configure each of these components.

Chapter 7, Adding Audio/Visual Appeal. This chapter covers how to work with media—audio and video—and different graphs and charts to present our data, graphically. As charts don't come with Sencha Touch, this chapter explains the steps to configure the charts framework with Sencha Touch and then use it to build interactive charts.

Chapter 8, Taking your Application Offline. In this chapter, we will see how to detect the offline mode on a device or a platform and how to model our application to make it work even in the offline mode.

Chapter 9, Engaging Users by Responding to Events. In browsers, we have mouse events whereas a touch device raises events specific to touch actions such as tab, Double tap, drag, swipe, and so on. In this chapter, we will look at the list of touch events the framework offers and the ways to handle them to respond to those events.

Chapter 10, Increased Relevance Using Geolocation. This chapter shows how to fetch the GeoLocation information on a device/platform and work with it. We will cover various aspects such as how to find out the direction and speed at which the device is moving, and how to integrate the Geolocation information with Google map to show interesting and relevant information to the user.