[Sugar-devel] Meeting about HTML activities

[Daniel Narvaez]

Hello,

we are going to kick off the work on HTML activities for 0.100 with a
meeting.

Time: 22 April 2013 (14:00 UTC)
Place: #sugar-meeting (freenode)

It would be really useful to know how many people are interested to
contribute, so please try to participate or, if you can't, let us know that
you intend to work on it with us. While the discussion is pretty technical
at the moment,. I expect everyone with a bit of html/javascript experience
will be able to participate to development down the road.

Here is a summary of the approaches that has been investigated so far

* WebKitGtk based activities. The activity structure would remain pretty
similar to the current one, with the HTML loaded in a WebView. We would
provide HTML/javascript libraries to implement UI controls and interact
with system services, like datastore and collaboration. It's not clear how
communication with the native side of the activity will be implemented,
there are a few alternatives that should be discussed further.

* Chromium integration. We would integrate the web apps framework provided
by the Chromium browser inside the Sugar shell, using a custom extension
and special casing home icons and window management. The advantage of this
approach is that it allows to make use of the Chromium web apps API,
http://developer.chrome.com/trunk/apps/about_apps.html.

* Firefox OS derivative. Basically we would take Firefox OS (which is based
on Android but can run on Linux, OS X and Windows too) and replace Gaia,
which is completely written in HTML/javascript and provides the user
experience. The advantage is that we would able to run on the top of most
popular OS system layers. The disadvantage is that all the activities and
the shell would need to be rewritten in HTML for this to be possible.

Other topics that should be discussed

* How much integration with other OSes user experience do we require? For
example on Android it might be possible to use only the system layers, or
to run alongside Android native applications.

So I suggest this agenda

* Discuss the three approaches summarized above.
* Decide which approach to take for 0.100.
* Write up a TODO for the first milestone.

Please let us know if you have any item to add!

-- 
Daniel Narvaez
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