Desktop web browsers include powerful developer tools, that help inspect web apps, trace server requests, etc. But what if our web app works fine on a desktop, but starts acting weirdly on a real mobile device? What about Progressive Web Apps, where the browser is not even visible? Mobile Chrome, Firefox and Safari don't have built-in DevTools - instead, the developer is expected to use remote debugging by connecting the mobile device to a PC via USB. Luckily there is a much simpler solution - a cross-browser javascript library painting a DevTools analogon right over the app in whatever browser you use.

In this tutorial I am going to demonstrate, how to add barcode scanner functionality to an HTML form built with Bootstrap - thus, enabling the user to scan a barcode with the smartphone camera or webcam.

How to read a barcode using the built-in camera of a tablet or smartphone from a web app built with HTML5 and JavaScript? In this post I am going to introduce two approaches making it possible with pure JavaScript and a modern mobile browser - no extra apps, no prerequisities!

A lot of mobile applications use the camera of a smartphone or tablet to scan barcodes or QR-codes from real-world products, documents, etc. But what about web applications built with HTML and JavaScript? Let's take a look at the possibilities we have with HTML5 and modern mobile browsers!

AJAX-driven data tables are a great tool to display large amounts of tabular data. Fetching the data in small portions via AJAX reduces network load and increases rendering performance, which is especially important in mobile web applications. Here is an example, of how the jQuery DataTables plugin can be used in a jQuery mobile app.

jQuery mobile has a built-in possibility to display dialog windows. However, once the dialog opens, the background goes blank instead of still showing the rest of the UI or at least a blurred or semi-transparent version of it. This article demonstrates, how to change this, making dialogs appear over a greyed-out version of the previous page.