On 6/18/14 12:20 PM, Ben Francis wrote:
On Wed, Jun 18, 2014 at 6:59 PM, James Burke <jbu...@mozilla.com
<mailto:jbu...@mozilla.com>> wrote:
So, I think we just need to set the expectation for at least
another year or two, that the gaia set of apps will not be able to
be "privileged", because we need them as early beta testers for
features and capabilities we are building out for the mobile web
platform.
We said that a year or two ago. There will always be new features to
test, and with a current total of 34 apps in the gaia/apps directory
we have no shortage of certified apps to test them out with. The risk
of inadvertently building another proprietary app platform that isn't
the web and of crippling the pace of Firefox OS updates because we're
forcing 34 apps through an arduous certification process they don't
need (a mistake Android already made for us) seems greater than the
risk of taking the brave step of making some Gaia apps a step closer
to being web apps.
The longer that each Gaia app is not a web app, the less credible our
mantra of "the web is the platform" becomes. If we can't figure out
how to build our own apps using the web, how can we can expect third
party app developers to do so?
Maybe we haven't yet figured out all the details of how to put the
Email app in the Firefox Marketplace, let alone how to make it run
cross-platform, but if we resign ourselves to the idea that all Gaia
apps are going to have to be certified for the foreseeable future then
we're not doing our mission justice IMHO.
It is a matter of degree: at least with Gaia apps we get the use of web
tech in the construction, just not the network delivery and
addressability, and by proving out the web APIs in Gaia first, we ensure
a better dev experience with those APIs later for all.
That is how I would frame the larger picture, in the effort of
cooperation and moving forward.
For me personally, I would absolutely not put a performance fix that is
only available for certified apps. See the use of the cookie cache in
email: it is ugly, but it is standard. Sometimes we need to do the
uglier things or have less ideal dev experience in the interests of
working on the common platform, file bugs for the platform, then switch
to something better when it is properly sorted out, available to all
apps. For email's cookie cache, I'm hopeful the proper answer will be
Service Workers.
But, I am not working on that platform code affected by the icon font
request, so it is easier for me to be harder philosophically in that
case. I would endorse that harder line though for performance changes
tied to "certified".
New features only in certified apps is a harder one to sort out. I
personally want to avoid features that are only available to certified
apps in email. However, since email depends on /shared, some of that
choice is out of email's control.
Maybe instead of using "certified" as the marker, we use app signing
instead, with a list of signatures that are allowed getting pushed as
part of device flashing, and a dev experience that overrides that, so
that we do not have to sign for our local dev-debug-deploy cycles.
James
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