Hi everyone, its interesting to see this discussing and i would like to bring in my opinion as a developer working with a hybrid stack for mobile app development a while now. To answer the first question: Do we really need iOS support for the crosswalk WebView?
From my point of view the only possible answer can be the question behind what value would it really add for any hybrid developer out there? As far as i can see it there was a time, not long ago, where two different WebViews for iOS existed. The old UiWebView and the new WkWebView. During this time people where urged to use the new web view because of significant preformance improvements but it was not working correctly on all versions of iOS and people started to write fallbacks and stuff. This is now obsolete as the Adoption for iOS 9 is one of the best i have seen out there. So using the new Version of Cordova with the WkWebview as a default should be an easy decision when targeting iOS with Cordova. Crosswalk solves a problem that exists and will still exist in the future. The fragmentation of the Android Devices and the underlying OS. Adoption rates for the current android version are horribly bad, but luckily we can wrap our apps with a non native web view. For iOS apple dos not allow any other web views for their platform. So where is the value for me as a developer, when i am sure that the underlying web view will be WkWebView. Unifying APIs? I think this is done by the Web Standards, and adoption is a decision Apple will have to make. I can’t see a proper way to start polyfilling browser features for iOS that are not already implemented. There is no urgent need for the majority of the community to do that. WkWebView is doing a quite good job. If there is one specific thing you are missing for your project it would be straight forward to add a cordova plugin that allows you to do use this feature, for example getUserMedia. And it would be really confusing to know crosswalk as unifying the web view by using chromium, but for iOS its simply not doing that. I think focusing on one problem and having the best solution, is what we really need and expect from crosswalk. And the problem is with Android. And i think there is also more to add there, as we are a bit behind the release track and the new versions of chromium add a lot of improvements and new features, to the web view. If its possible to use a different underlying browser on iOS, its time to move forward and add iOS to crosswalk. But maybe this will never happen. Hope that helps and to hear your thoughts. All the best Ahmed > Am 08.03.2016 um 03:55 schrieb Dong, Jonathan <jonathan.d...@intel.com>: > > Hi Crosswalk folks, > > Recently we’ve come across an issue in Cordova Plugin Crosswalk WebView for > iOS support, and I think it could be worthy to discuss here. Recently I’m > working on enabling iOS support incordova-plugin-crosswalk-webview > <https://github.com/crosswalk-project/cordova-plugin-crosswalk-webview> > project (which only supports Android platform for now) by integrating a > prebuilt library of crosswalk-ios > <https://github.com/crosswalk-project/crosswalk-ios>, as Crosswalk for iOS is > implemented based on the WKWebView introduced by iOS 8, it requires the > minimum Cordova version to be 6.0.0 above and Cordova-iOS version to be 4.0.0 > above. Because Cordova plugin mechanism does not provide the plugin users to > choose which platform to adopt among its supported platforms, it means the > existing cordova-plugin-crosswalk-webivew users whose application also > support iOS platform will face the upgrade pain (from UIWebView to WKWebView > based Crosswalk XWalkView, and upgrade Cordova & Cordova-iOS as well) once > the Crosswalk-19 is get released. There’s already a discussion based this PR: > https://github.com/crosswalk-project/cordova-plugin-crosswalk-webview/pull/81 > <https://github.com/crosswalk-project/cordova-plugin-crosswalk-webview/pull/81> > > So the questions could be: > 1. Do we really need to enable iOS support within > cordova-plugin-crosswalk-webview? > 2. If the answer to question 1 is yes, how do we minimize the upgrade > pain to the existing plugin user whose application also support iOS? > > My thoughts about question 1 is this could be a good chance to prompt the > adoption of Crosswalk project for iOS, but the risk we have to take is the > upgrade pain for the plugin users as described above, which would result of > complaint or even user lost. And we could create a standalone Cordova plugin > project which contains only Crosswalk XWalkView for iOS, this solution won’t > break the current usage of the cordova-plugin-crosswalk-webview project, but > it will break the common design idiom of Cordova Plugin (support as more > platform as it could within on plugin, by my understanding), and we will lose > the chance to prompt Crosswalk project for iOS. > > For question 2, the solutions I can think of are the following two: > 1. Give the plugin user a chance to choose if he’d like to adopt iOS > platform support during the plugin installation procedure, which needs to > rewrite the pre-install hooks to prompt users to choose to install iOS > resources or not. We still have details to investigate, but anyway the > implementation could be dirty because we have to take over some > functionalities that Cordova provides which may face the compatibility issue > when Cordova CLI get updated; > 2. Patch Cordova to provide the feature that plugin user can choose the > preferred platform to adopt among the supported platform. This is the most > elegant solution I can think of, but I’m not sure if it could be adopt by the > Cordova community and it will take time to implement and get released. > > Thoughts and feedbacks are appreciated, Thanks. > _______________________________________________ > Crosswalk-dev mailing list > Crosswalk-dev@lists.crosswalk-project.org > <mailto:Crosswalk-dev@lists.crosswalk-project.org> > https://lists.crosswalk-project.org/mailman/listinfo/crosswalk-dev > <https://lists.crosswalk-project.org/mailman/listinfo/crosswalk-dev>
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