Scratchpad/WebAppIntegration

What are WebApps?

"Web apps" is a term that people are using a lot with multiple different definitions:

1) A webapp is just URL. The browser is modified so that it hides the address bar and other tools. It gets a seperate entry in the taskbar, so it looks to the workspace like a new app.

chromium-browser --app=http://bbc.co.uk/news
rekonq --webapp http://bbc.co.uk/news

Firefox has no such feature, Mozilla did have Prism this is now unmaintained.

2) A webapp is a collection of HTML, JS, images etc. It allows offline usage of a webpage, with local storage for data/config.

3) A webapp is local HTML with extensions to make it function like a native app. To access power / notifications / etc.

See Firefox OS or Tizen or to some extent Unity. (unity ships javascript to add notification functionality on a per-site basis)

4) Any arbitrary combination of the above :)

Goals

Tier 1

Make the web apps on Chromium and Firefox "stores" integrate into KDE's kickoff menu. These fit web app descriptions 1 and 2.

Firefox

Firefox installed .desktop files itself when apps were installed. This broke. Sho fixed it. This should be working again

Chromium

This does not work / integrate. I think I can make it work.

Chromium allows for plugins, this https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/management.html#method-getAll

has function chrome.management.onInstalled.addListener(function(ExtensionInfo info) {...});

This will notify us on new apps / apps removed. Unfortunately as a browser plugin we can't interact with the "outside world" to create a .desktop file, or anything useful:

So... We create a NPAPI plugin (browser plugin) with qtbrowserplugin. This can run in Chromium or FF. Our plugin will have a JS invokable method to create a .desktop file with a given id, name + icon. (plus one to remove.).

Our Chromium plugin calls our NPAPI plugin to do the actual .desktop installing.

(this is sort of how the unity extensions work)

Tier 2

Unity level notifications with existing web apps (firefox, chromium and rekonq?)

In theory Unity code should "just run", as they ship a plugin that emits xdg notifications for events

Tier 3

???