Hi Matt, You are totally right. We are looking at building a better appcache. There are some early plans from the WebAPI team to implement Navigation Controller which is a lower level scriptable cache, in order to avoid the mistakes made in the original appcache and allow developers to roll their own behavior: https://github.com/slightlyoff/NavigationController/ .
Following that the idea would be to implement a declarative version on top that captures common use cases and would succeed the original appcache. The first pass of what that might look like is here: https://github.com/slightlyoff/NavigationController/blob/master/examples/new-manifest/spec.md Also one of the inputs into this process has been the following collection of use cases: http://www.w3.org/wiki/Webapps/AppCacheUseCases . If you have some specific insights from building the Marketplace app, it'd be great to capture that so we can feed that into this process as we move to an appcache that is a better fit for developers who are building offline access into their apps. Cheers, -Travis ----- Original Message ----- From: "Matt Basta" <[email protected]> To: "gene vayngrib" <[email protected]> Cc: [email protected] Sent: Tuesday, July 16, 2013 1:53:53 PM Subject: Re: Can we deprecate packaged apps? While using appcache may be possible, it's a poor alternative to packaged apps for offline app development. Rather than encouraging workarounds, we should be building a better, more stable (and sane) solution. If offline is a hassle, developers aren't going to do it and that's a lose for users. ----- Original Message ----- From: "gene vayngrib" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Monday, July 15, 2013 9:23:48 PM Subject: Re: Can we deprecate packaged apps? Matt, although appcache is very flaky, it is possible to minimize it's problems by loading just the first page and a script using appcache and then roll your own appcache functionality replacement using LocalStorage and IndexedDB (with the fallback to WebSQL) for the rest of the app assets. We did so with Urbini (see it on github), and it works fine. Said that, I would not recommend doing it yourself, as the level of complexity is 10x of the appcache, just use some JS framework. Anyway, off-lining app assets does not give me access to Bluetooth, as an example of my problem at hand. I want my app to talk to Pebble watch, various fitness and medical devices. Packaged apps supposedly give me this privilege the same way native apps do - they allow distributor to: 1) verify that I am not a spammer/virus maker/Chinese hacker 2) inspect my code and vouch for it, to a degree 3) revoke my distribution rights if I violated the trust Do not get me wrong, I hate that we have relegated to the downloadable software model. Like Ben, I am sad. So I am brewing some ideas on how to address the problems of trust and damage control. The direction of my thought is that the rights given to me do not need to be binary, they can grow as I gain more trust. Also, networks like Facebook and LinkedIn, often serve as good deterrents from the behaviour that puts others at risk. Gene Vayngrib _______________________________________________ dev-webapps mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-webapps _______________________________________________ dev-webapps mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-webapps _______________________________________________ dev-webapps mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-webapps
