868168 - Need an easy way to install applications from manifest

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox OS Graveyard :: Gaia, defect)

Description

[Kevin Grandon :kgrandon]

We should have some way inside of a gaia profile to easily install third party privileged applications. Implementing a button to launch the file picker and installing an app from a manifest is fairly trivial to do. In addition, we should support:

- Creating a HTTPD server identity for your new application <app>.gaiamobile.org without browser restart.
- Serving files from the app using our HTTPD server without browser restart.

One option I was thinking about was symlinking the application directory to test_apps/.

Comment 1

[Ben Francis [:benfrancis]]

Huh? Why on earth would I want to serve a third party application from <app>.gaiamobile.org? This makes no sense.

If we want to create an extension to make it easy for third party developers to set up a local HTTP server for testing then that's fine, but has nothing to do with Gaia.

The interface to install an app from a manifest should be part of the devtools UI.

Comment 2

[Kevin Grandon :kgrandon]

I disagree. We have an HTTPD plugin already for gaia, seems that it should be fairly trivial to utilize this for third party applications as well, instead of duplicating the code.

Comment 3

[Kevin Grandon :kgrandon]

For reference, here is my current workflow when I build a third party app:

1 - cp -R test_apps/template test_apps/my_custom_app
2 - *make edits to app*
3 - DEBUG=1 make

I now have a save-refresh workflow for third party apps. My suggestion is to remove steps 1 and 3 with a single button. I think that it would be nice if developers could work with a save-refresh flow with an app located anywhere on disk.

Comment 4

[Ben Francis [:benfrancis]]

If you have to download & build Gaia in order to develop an Open Web App something is very wrong. Remember that web apps should ultimately be independent of not only Gaia, but Firefox OS as well!

I share the desire to want a save-refresh workflow for third party apps, but having Gaia be a dependency for that is not only nonsensical, in my view its harmful to our mission.

Comment 5

[Kevin Grandon :kgrandon]

There's no ultimatums here. There's no reason that we can't have both - a great developer experience within gaia, and in the browser.

When I develop iOS applications, I do 80% of my work in a standalone browser, 10% in the emulator, and 10% on a device. We should leave it up to the developer to decide on their own workflow. A lot of engineers desire to see their app running within the operating system - I think we should provide that.

Obviously having a better raw native app experience within the browser would also be a big win. We've started doing that with some of the recent gecko patches, and I'm hoping to do more here.

Comment 6

[Ben Francis [:benfrancis]]

(In reply to Kevin Grandon :kgrandon from comment #5)
> There's no ultimatums here. There's no reason that we can't have both - a
> great developer experience within gaia, and in the browser.

I don't understand what you mean. Gaia is a collection of web apps, Firefox provides a runtime in which to run those apps. Firefox OS provides another. Someone should be able to swap out Gaia for a different collection of web apps and if we succeed in our mission Gaia apps would run in other runtimes too.

> When I develop iOS applications, I do 80% of my work in a standalone
> browser, 10% in the emulator, and 10% on a device.

When I develop a web app, I do 70% of my work in Firefox, 10% in Chrome, 10% in Safari and 10% in Internet Explorer. But I don't have to build my app separately for each platform and deploy it to myapp.mozilla.org, myapp.google.com, myapp.apple.com and myapp.microsoft.com. I just run a local web server as myapp.com and then load it in each browser. That's the power of the open web.

Now I accept that matters are complicated by the fact that we've chosen (for better or worse) to go down the path of packaging some of our apps. But we shouldn't lose sight of what web apps are and start thinking like native app developers with their walled gardens.

> We should leave it up to
> the developer to decide on their own workflow. A lot of engineers desire to
> see their app running within the operating system - I think we should
> provide that.

You don't run a web app in Gaia, you run it in a runtime. If you install an app in Firefox and run Gaia in Firefox then Gaia should see your app when it enumerates apps from the apps API. Then you can launch your app from inside Gaia if you want to. We don't need a way to install apps into Gaia, we need a way to install apps into Firefox, that's the only distinction I'm making.

I'm sorry if I sound like I'm just going off on a rant here but I think it's vitally important that we clearly communicate that you don't develop web apps for Firefox OS, you develop web apps for the web. If our developer tools encourage the former, then we have just added to the problem we are trying to solve.

Comment 7

[Kevin Grandon :kgrandon]

Closing this one out as the landscape has changed dramatically with the addition of the app manager.

I'm not convinced we're quite there yet, but I'll open bugs as the opportunity arises after talking to the devtools team more.