Exploring Our Sample Application

It’s time to introduce our sample application. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’re likely aware of the range of popular “check in” style applications that have flourished along with the explosion of mobile devices. Whether it’s Foursquare, Latitude, TripIt, or other similar apps, these all allow you to announce your position to the wide world—presumably so your fans and the paparazzi can track your famous movements. Many of these applications are implemented as native applications for a given device, but there’s nothing that stops us from developing the same style of application as a web application available within the browser of any device.

Our application is fully self-contained in ch09–example03.html, which you can run from your chosen web browser. Let’s take a look from the users’ perspective first, to see what it (apparently) does. Pointing our browser to the page brings up the very simple, but functional, home page of our new location-based check-in style application, which you can see in Figure 9–4.