Comment by johnyzee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by johnyzee | Hacker News Reader

It is based on AppMobi that Intel bought some months ago. AppMobi was an alternative to PhoneGap, but it attempted to streamline the whole process of wrapping an HTML5 app into a native app, with an "IDE" (more of a GUI for the build process) and a cloud-based assembly and provisioning platform. And of course a lot of proprietary APIs for stuff like in-app payments, social integration, etc.

I tried AppMobi early on but as a developer I much prefer something open like PhoneGap, even if (or because) I have to glue the pieces together by myself. I don't really see the demographic that knows how to develop an HTML5 web application but prefers a closed black-box environment for putting together the mobile app.

The AppMobi XDK was pretty slick though. But from the announcement it seems like they pretty much tore it down and started over from scratch.

These days I hold higher hopes for real convert-to-native tools, that actually translates HTML5 (f.ex. the canvas API) to native code.

AppMobi actually used Ejecta[1] for their Canvas2D rendering on iOS - which it seems also made its way into the Intel XDK[2]. I believe they have their own implementation for Canvas2D on Android, but sadly, it's all closed source.

I should really get a cross-platform effort for Ejecta going. We have CocoonJS and Intel's XDK, but afaik there's no Open Source alternative right now.

[1] http://impactjs.com/ejecta

[2] http://www.html5dev-software.intel.com/amdocs/readmes/ios.ap...

Ejecta is awesome. I remember helping out in the early days of it, fixing up some alpha and rotation bugs... it's a shame how badly intel's "accelerated" canvas performs on android. On the nexus 4, native canvas looks better and performs roughly the same.

There is an effort to port ejecta to android, which a company I used to work for is now maintaining. That means accelerated canvas for the big two.

I thought I'd put more detail in. The project is called ejecta-x. http://wizcorp.github.io/Ejecta-X/

I've been praying for something like Ejecta and CocoonJS that is both cross-platform and open source. I always imagined that the canvas API should translate rather easily to native graphics mode, but it is probably not that simple.

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