Working with Cordova apps in WebIDE

Apache Cordova enables you to write an app using HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, and then generate native versions of it for mobile platforms such as iOS and Android. With Cordova you can also generate versions of your app for Firefox OS.

From Firefox 39 onwards, WebIDE directly supports Cordova apps: this means that  you can edit Cordova apps in WebIDE, and WebIDE takes care of generating the Firefox OS version for you.

First, create a Cordova app, as you normally would:

• Install Cordova, if you haven't already:

  npm install -g cordova

• Create your Cordova app:

  cordova create my-app

• Add Firefox OS as a target platform for your app:

  cd my-app
  cordova platform add firefoxos

Next:

• open WebIDE
• select "Open Packaged App",  and select the directory containing your Cordova app's config.xml file.

Now you can edit the app as a Cordova app, and whenever you run the app, WebIDE takes care of generating the Firefox OS version behind the scenes. WebIDE also regenerates the Firefox OS version whenever you make any changes that would affect your app's manifest, so it can perform manifest validation.