On Tue, May 1, 2012 at 4:28 PM, Dave Johnson <[email protected]>wrote:
> Hi all, I just wanted to start a discussion about Cordova as a > solution for building desktop apps and get some ideas flowing around > what people are thinking about that. > Sounds fun to me. It would be useful to talk about what the difference between Cordova Desktop and things like Fluid, XULRunner, etc are. Fluid appears to be "less programmable" now, in the free version. I think the free version used to have user scripts, but I think you have to pay for that now. > Good idea? Bad idea? What do people think about using the OS webview > vs embedding webkit? Whatever else ... > Let's start with "who has webview widgets available?" - Mac OSX - WebView - Linux - I think both GTK and Qt have a WebView-ish thang in their UI frameworks - Windows - IE control So the question is, can we do what we want with a pre-existing native "WebView"? Maybe. And then gauge that against the expense of doing new WebKit ports - which seems HUMONGOUS to me. Howzabout "use stripped down version of FireBug" or "stripped down version of Chromium" - available on the interesting platforms, maybe it's easy to remove bits from their builds than it is to do a new build from scratch. Also, kinda odd-ball choice here, but Eclipse SWT has a Java "Browser" widget which is essentially a WebView. I used it in the "Mac app version" of weinre. Super easy to use, portable API across platforms. Lastly, I'll note one environmental aspect that I've noticed while playing with this stuff over the years. The ability to debug your JS/HTML in a lot of these environments is downright shitty. Been enough to completely turn me off diving deeper. -- Patrick Mueller http://muellerware.org
