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MacGapProject / MacGap1

Desktop WebKit wrapper for HTML/CSS/JS applications.
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Cross platform? #104

Open ghost opened 10 years ago

ghost commented 10 years ago

Hey, I like this project much more than node-webkit, which is 70+mb on the mac.

Are there any plans for cross platform versions of this? (At least for linux)?

jeff-h commented 10 years ago

MacGap is very OS-X focussed, as part of its lightweight ideal. However, it would be awesome to have a linux and Windows equivalent, ideally sharing the same JavaScript API.

I see you already found https://github.com/pyrated/pengap which sounds ideal. Perhaps we could hound @pyrated to bring it up-to-date with some of our newer stuff? :) It would most likely be a reasonable amount of effort on his part though, now that we have menus, JS callbacks, user defaults etc

I think there's an underlying philosophical problem which is that MacGap is deliberately not a "lowest common denominator" solution, which PhoneGap / Cordova and all the others deliberately are. My goal is that MacGap apps should be indistinguishable from pure-Objective-C apps and I'm not convinced this can be achieved when also trying to maintain 1:1 feature compatibility with Linux and/or Windows versions.

Please let us know if you find any similar projects / solutions for other platforms, even if their JavaScript API is different. I don't imagine it would be too difficult to maintain a few different versions of the same JS app, each taking into account different platform shell capabilities. The vast majority of most apps' JS code base would go unchanged, I think.

ghost commented 10 years ago

It seems the pengap guy has now simply removed his code! :(

lavignes commented 10 years ago

pengap was a random thing I made in a weekend when I was an undergrad. While the parts of the API I had implemented did functionally work, it was really a series of nasty hacks.

Methods in the API were sent from webkit as console messages to a key value parser in the controller.

It is by no means something I would consider for production. Just a proof of concept. It would need to be done in a much more sane way, but I only had knowledge of console callbacks for WebkitGTK at the time.

jeff-h commented 10 years ago

@pyrated — thanks for your input. As mentioned above, a Linux equivalent for MacGap would be really awesome. There really aren't any lightweight options that I am aware of. Any way you might be interested in making PenGap the answer? :)