[Question] How can I develop my own web app running on Cobalt

[陳立展]

Hi, I wonder if I could ask question through the email like this.

I had experience of building normal web apps for desktop and mobile before, and want to create my own video web app (similar to Youtube TV) on cross platforms, e.g. Smart TVs, game consoles.

I heard of Cobalt recently and all I know so far is a lightweight browser that we could run web applications using a subset of HTML/CSS/JS on it.

I also read the documentation of Cobalt (https://cobalt.dev/) but I'm still confused about it. It seems that Cobalt could be built only on Linux or Raspberry Pi. Can I also develop it within my Mac OS environment? Could anyone provide some tutorial or explanation about how the development process looks like?

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Chen Li Zhan

Website: http://chenlizhan.com/

GitHub: https://github.com/ChenLiZhan

[Lam Bui]

Hi Chen Li Zhan,

Thanks for your interest in Cobalt! You are correct that Cobalt supports a subset of HTML/CSS/JS. 

To provide a little more clarity here, there are two types of Cobalt-related development:

- platform (e.g. porting to a particular platform like RasPi)

- web app (e.g. building a web app that is compatible running on Cobalt)

At this moment we expect Cobalt platform development to happen on Linux-based systems and base our development and testing on the Linux platform. We currently have no plans to support platform development on Mac OS.

That being said, after the Cobalt binary/executable is built and able to run on a supported platform, you could develop the web app that Cobalt will load on any platform. For example, you could build the web app on any platform with a text editor and then load the URL of your web app with Cobalt using the `--url` flag:

./cobalt --url="<MY_WEBAPP_URL>"

As long as the web app is built to conform to the subset of HTML/CSS/JS that is supported by Cobalt, it should work. 

Does that help make things a bit more clear?

[dominic...@broadcom.com]

Can you help me find documentation about the subset of HTML/CSS/JS supported by Cobalt?

I looked at https://cobalt.dev/overview.html, but it lead me to a broken link:

https://cobalt.dev/cobalt/development/reference/supported-features.html

[Lam Bui]

Thanks for pointing out the broken link, Dominic. We'll get that fixed.

In the meantime, if you look in the sidebar, under Developers --> Reference --> Cobalt Support it should lead you where you need to go:

https://cobalt.dev/development/reference/supported-features.html

[Lam Bui]

Just an update that we fixed the links in https://cobalt.dev/overview.html, Dominic.

Thanks again for pointing that out to us!