from Hacker News

Capacitor: Universal Web Applications

by fariz_ on 4/3/18, 4:39 PM with 50 comments

• by yesimahuman on 4/3/18, 5:29 PM

  Capacitor creator/Ionic co-founder here. Didn’t expect to see this on the front page! Disclaimer: it’s still alpha.

  We’re building Capacitor based on feedback from the Ionic community to improve our ability to move across platforms such as App Store/web/electron, make it easier to interact with Native SDKs, mix web and native UI, and manage native app projects/tooling.

  One feature I'm really excited about is having Web UI implementations of many Native experiences when running on the web/electron. Here's an example of how the `Camera` plugin looks when running in the web: https://twitter.com/maxlynch/status/961749127657910272. This uses our new Ionic Web Components so you can easily use these controls with low overhead even if you aren't using Ionic.

  We hope Capacitor will be useful to other web developers that want to build mobile and desktop web apps, even if they aren’t using Ionic, and we’re building support for hitting the hybrid sweet spot of native UI shell (nav/menus) with web content.

  Capacitor will eventually be replacing Cordova in Ionic’s toolchain so it’s going to be a core part of the experience.

• by osrec on 4/3/18, 5:03 PM

  Why not just PWAs? I think the browser has come a long way, and a great number of things can now be accomplished in the browser without any additional frameworks. We built Bx (https://usebx.com) without any frameworks and it feels much like a native app on a phone or tablet when added to the home screen.

• by jacquesc on 4/3/18, 5:33 PM

  Glad to see they're moving beyond Cordova's main issue: trying to fully automate the native build processes with disastrous results.

  I am perfectly happy opening up Xcode to build and configure. Same with Android Studio. Trying to find a "Cordova solution" to very common build tasks was a continual nightmare for me.

  I ended up just switching to React Native to wrap a progressive web app. It makes no sense since I'm only using a single React component (UIWebView), but the build / deploy process was just so much easier to manage than the mess of Cordova scripts and outdated/broken plugins.

• by the-dude on 4/3/18, 5:03 PM

  I stumbled upon https://blog.ionicframework.com/announcing-capacitor-1-0-0-a... last week, much more info there.

• by oldgun on 4/3/18, 5:49 PM

  Love to see this happen, but how's the performance (responsiveness, memory consumptions) compared to native? I believe the main reason people are reluctant to develop web-based apps is performance, which results in poor user experience.

  Any benchmarks/testings to show the performance is on par?

• by zedpm on 4/3/18, 6:45 PM

  I hope this works out, and I hope it fixes some of the grief that Cordova causes. We've ended up with some legacy apps built with Ionic, and have had so many problems that trace directly back to Cordova that we're looking very seriously at complete rewrites.

  Integrating with some third-party like Auth0 goes smoothly for our projects until we get to Cordova, at which point we start chasing absurd bugs and explaining to their support that we do actually need Cordova support. We've been told more than once that Cordova is the "problem child" in terms of supported platforms.

• by atonse on 4/3/18, 5:21 PM

  Is this a competitor to React Native? RN seems to be the ideal: truly native components but a JS programming model.

• by mamcx on 4/15/18, 2:55 AM

  Please, if possible, make it truly easy to integrate.

  All of the others tools requiere multi-steps to integrate into android/ios projects. Even if "generating a already integrate project" is available, the ideal is just import with gradle or carthage/coccoapods and that is all.

• by headcanon on 4/3/18, 5:51 PM

  I see this is from the ionic people - What are the goals for this vs ionic? Is this supposed to eventually replace it? Will it still be pushing Angular on us, or is it possible to use any JS framework?

• by frlnBorg on 4/3/18, 4:59 PM

  Early 2018?