I have been building sites for a long time and I am pretty confident in modern frameworks like Bootstrap etc. I have played about with JQuery Mobile and UI. I know how to make mobile sites from a front end side. I understand that I could upload my site to PhoneGap and turn it into a native app.
However, I would love to know how to make useful apps. For a very basic example, developing an app to find pizza shops in the local area.
I know how to make mobile sites easily enough. I just don’t really understand how to link that up with dynamic data from APIs etc , or even where to begin. If someone could point me in the right direction for where I could experiment with this I would be really grateful .
I would not advise using something like PhoneGap, as that seems to make a native app that is basically just html wrapped by a webview on the device and does not make for a very nice experience.
For your app to talk to your server to get data, the server needs to expose some kind of web service. Like a RESTful JSON service for example. That endpoint would need to be developed to handle all the needs of the app. Then in your app, you make an HTTP call and parse the response into objects. Then you can do what you want with that data.
Regarding writing an actual web service, that will depend on your current server / site setup and what language you going to use
You will need to contact the webmasters of the pizza chains, and ask about their APIs to pull their data. You can use PhoneGap for this, since you already have a background in web technologies.
