Apps

Web App Developer Initiative

In 2015, Mozilla launched a new initiative to energize mobile web app development. This initiative is part of a broad trend that includes browser makers, web frameworks, cloud service providers, and content providers. We don't yet agree on what to call these new web apps, but we do agree on their potential. What unites all these disparate parties is a belief in the combined power of several new web standards. By making web apps that work offline and can reengage users, we believe developers will deliver experiences that will redefine the role of the web on mobile devices.

In the short term, we are focused on the combination of several API's -- service workers, web push, and the W3C app app manifest.

Communications

Team

• Thomas Elin, Program Manager
• Harald Kirschner, Engineering Manager
• Myk Melez, Software Architect
• Bill Walker, Senior Manager

Find us on IRC

• We use the #apps channel on Mozilla's IRC server

Mailing Lists

• apps@mozilla.com - Broader opt-in list for those interested in regular WADI updates.
• marketplace-content-ecosystem@mozilla.com - Internal WADI members. Used for brainstorming and general conversation.

Reading List

• Paul Kinlin, "Living with Web Apps"
  • In this post, Paul gives an hour-by-hour journal of a day using only web content on his smartphone. Along the way he offers a list of "ten deadly sins of a mobile web app" along with other reflections on his experience.

• Alex Russell, "Progressive Apps: Escaping Tabs without Losing our Soul"
  • Alex lays out his best practices for modern web development based around responsive design and single-page apps, and moves on to how the addition of offlining and "save to home screen" capabilities enrich the mobile web.

• Alex Komoroske and Elisabeth Morant, "The Next Generation Mobile Web"
  • In this 40 minute Google I/O talk, Alex and Elisabeth show examples using these new API's, especially concentrating on how web push creates exciting new opportunities for user reengagement.

Oghliner

Ship v1 of Oghliner, a library/tool to offline web apps using Service Workers and deploy them to GitHub Pages. We will base this on top of several existing open source projects, including sw-precache from the Chrome team (https://github.com/GoogleChrome/sw-precache).

• Oghliner v1 - https://github.com/mozilla/oghliner

Platatus

Ship MVP of at least one serious offline/progressive web app. We need to explore the space of possible use cases – to help developers, to find bugs in the implementation, to expand our own understanding. Much of the work of building even simple demo apps is app-related and not related to the underlying technologies. The leading candidate is Platatus, an app that offers a detailed, data-driven view of Mozilla's progress on delivering the technologies behind Progressive Web apps.

• Platatus MVP - https://github.com/mozilla/platatus - minimal viable prototype of reference app that describes standardization/implementation status of web platform features

Service Worker Cookbook

Create a cookbook of self-contained code snippets showing how to use Service Workers to achieve various kinds of cacheing and push notification use cases.

• https://serviceworker-cookbook.herokuapp.com/
• https://github.com/mozilla/serviceworker-cookbook

History

2015 Q4 Deliverables

In Q4, we prepared for the launch of both Web Push and Service Workers in Firefox 44 by building Oghliner, the Service Worker cookbook, and the Platform Status page.

2015 Q3 Deliverables

In Q3, our goals for WADI engineering were (1) to transition off our legacy projects, (2) to educate ourselves about serviceworkers and web push, and (3) to plan for Q4. We had roughly a month of Q3 to work with. We accomplished these goals by encouraging each engineer to build small prototypes and sharing what we learned in a daily standup. These prototypes led to our presentation in the Firefox OS all-hands, a Github Universe talk, as well as the filing of several important platform and product bugs (and fixing of one!).

• https://firekey.org/
• https://brendandahl.github.io/pdfcollection/
• https://marco-c.github.io/watchy/#/series
• https://mozilla.github.io/high-fidelity/#/podcasts

Bug tracking

These are bugs we've identified as critical to our ability to deploy these technologies to developers. We use bug 1201717 to track them.

Bugzilla query error

Array ( [type] => error [message] => http-bad-status [params] => Array ( [0] => 404 [1] => Not Found ) ) 1

Other Resources

Program Plan tracking goal progression and key activities

(this page previously contained information about Firefox OS Apps)