On Thu, Dec 6, 2012 at 1:51 AM, Fabrice Desre <[email protected]> wrote:
> Appcache has both design flaws (impossible to fix before we have > appcache v2), and we face gecko implementation defects. Is anyone working on defining a v2 of appcache which will help us to deprecate packaged apps in the future? I'd like to help with that if I can. The Fixing Application Cache Community Group at the W3C has gone awfully quiet http://www.w3.org/community/fixing-appcache/ I know Jonas has suggested we come up with a draft proposal for what we think appcache should like. I hope he doesn't mind me quoting him from a private email thread: The main problems that forced us > to do packaged apps was: > * Signing is much more reliable when you don't have to worry about > intermediaries messing with the resources. > * Separate stores will need to create separate signatures and will get > out-of-sync (at least for short periods of time) for which version > they sign. Dealing with that is complicated if the resources and/or > signatures live on the developer's server. > * If you have to send the resources to a store for signing, you don't > get much benefit from having them hosted on your sever anyway. Appcache probably can't solve all of these problems on its own, but maybe it can help with some. The message coming out of Google and Mozilla at the moment is that if you want a performant web app which can access cool device APIs, you need to create a packaged app. If we don't believe that's the future of the web then we should probably come up with at least a proposal of an alternative before it becomes too late to put the genie back in the bottle. If we do stick with packaged apps, I see a chance that could end up being standardised by the System Applications Working Group http://www.w3.org/2012/09/sysapps-wg-charter As a side note, The Financial Times is hosting a developer event at Facebook in the UK in February and Google will be there too. I believe they've invited someone from Mozilla to talk on the topic of "privileged access" for web apps and be part of a panel debating these issues but so far I don't think anyone has stepped forward. I would like to participate but I'm not sure exactly what Mozilla's position is on this and feel wholly unqualified to speak! At the Getting Started with Firefox OS event in London tomorrow, we're going to use a modified version of the Firefox OS Simulator that Harald Kirschner has created for us which allows you to add permissions to privileged APIs to a hosted app inside Firefox for the purposes of development. But we will have to tell developers that if they want to actually publish this app it will have to packaged. Ben -- Ben Francis http://tola.me.uk _______________________________________________ dev-b2g mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-b2g
