Web or Dead

[Benjamin Francis]

Hi all,

As part of the B2G Transition Project we are deprecating the legacy mozApps runtime in favour of new standards-based web apps.

On the kanikani branch of Gaia (soon to be merged into master) the core smartphone system apps (system, homescreen, keyboard, search, settings etc.) have been turned into system chrome. We are aiming to turn all the other apps into web apps. Real web apps. On the actual web. With an actual URL :)

You can now find a list of those apps at mozilla-b2g.github.io/gaia which allows you to load them in your web browser. You'll notice that none of them currently work.

We need your help to modernise these apps with new web standards like Web App Manifest, Service Workers and Push Notifications and figure out how to get them working on the web. This will require new approaches to some functionality that isn't safe to expose to the web, we might need to run local web services on the device to replace some legacy APIs for example.

If we can't figure out how to run these things on the web then we may eventually remove some of the apps altogether. That's why I titled this email "web or dead".

It's a testament to the work that we've done so far with B2G that we now have the standards we need to build modern apps on the web which are discoverable, installable and offline-capable. It's time to embrace that future and leave behind the old B2G-only apps we created to "prove out and prioritise the power of the system" when we started out on this journey together.

Find us in #fxos on IRC, Discourse, or on this mailing list if you're interested in contributing to this effort and have ideas about how to move it forward.

Keep on rockin' the free web!

Ben

[Justin D'Arcangelo]

I'm really glad to hear this effort is underway to move towards real, actual web apps! Having worked on the Music NGA rewrite, I can say that much of the necessary work to facilitate this transition should already be done for the Music app. The biggest hard-dependency the app had on legacy mozApps that may still be an obstacle is the DeviceStorage API. However, since the backend is abstracted out via ServiceWorkers, it should be relatively easy to substitute DeviceStorage for something else like maybe IndexedDB or even a cached copy of a cloud-based storage provider.

I believe when we landed Music NGA on master, we shipped with ServiceWorkers OFF by default when building. The backend was done in a way that sort of "polyfilled" the Fetch API if you build with ServiceWorkers turned off. So, you may need to build with a flag to get a SW-enabled version of the Music app (I believe the flag is "NGA_SERVICE_WORKERS=1").

If I get some time after the work week, I can take a closer look at helping with this transition. In the meantime, if anyone out there wants to start on this, feel free to reach out to me for any questions regarding the architecture, etc.

-Justin

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