Apps using Oxide

doniks

Dear UBports!

There is this long coming change of replacing oxide with qtwebengine. I understand that in the (very) near future, browser and webapps will be based on qtwebengine and not on oxide anymore.

How does this affect third party apps that use oxide? Will they just continue to work as well (or as badly) as they do now, or are some changes in the libraries, repositories, sdk apis, somethingelse coming that would require some (immediate) action by third party developers?

Case in point, there is this cute little email client that tries to climb out of the fog of history back into the open store, but it happens to have oxide tatooed on the inside of it's eyelids ....

mariogrip

We are moving 100% to qtwebengine/morph on devel really soon this week.

For native webapps they would magic move to qtwebengine since we are changing the container code. webapps+ is a different story since they import oxide, they have to be ported.

Ubuntu.Web is ported to qtwebengine, but depreciated.
Morph.Web is the new library that's based on Ubuntu.Web so its backwards comparability with it.

For qml apps using Ubuntu.Web without using oxide specific apis would "just work" without needing to port them.

Oxide will be removed, so this is where you would need to do "porting". Most apis are similar or has similar options. Any app that import oxide has to be ported.

Morph.Web is mostly qtwebengine but with user agent scaling for convergence + some other fixes to make it work better for phones and desktops, this is a small library. I really recommend using this.

import QtQuick 2.4
import Morph.Web 0.1

WebView {
     url: "http://ubuntu.com"
}

I will make a more of a "guide" once devel is out with 100% QtWebEngine.

doniks

@mariogrip damn. I was hoping it would just be a new library and a new api and the old library and api would continue to be for the time being

advocatux

@doniks I assume there will be a "transition phase", not a drastic kill

doniks

@advocatux said in Apps using Oxide:

@doniks I assume there will be a "transition phase", not a drastic kill

@mariogrip can you comment on that? The way I read your message, there is no transition phase.

That will certainly affect the time to market of /cute little email client/. I haven't checked it myself, but @delijati thankfully gave it a shot and fixed some stuff, but is still stuck with other stuff still. So, well, it's work for sure

mariogrip

@doniks Yes there will be a transition phase, we wont "just remove" oxide The phase time really depends if and how many apps it breaks, since we keep Ubuntu.Web we really hope the transition would be minimal.

What i meant with 100% QtWebEngine is that every part that is "pre-installed" like browser, web container etc would be moved over, not that we would remove oxide.

Ubuntu.Web will still exist and will not go anywhere, It will still be based on oxide until oxide is removed, once oxide is removed it will be moved over to QtWebEngine so it will continue to work (unless it uses oxide only apis)

The oxide api will be removed at some point, when is still unsure. We would need to go over and see how many apps use this raw, and how many apps will break as an result of this. We will also try our best to create a compat layer to be able to make the transition without breaking apps (like webapps+)

doniks

@mariogrip thanks for clarifying!

doniks

@mariogrip said in Apps using Oxide:

I will make a more of a "guide" once devel is out with 100% QtWebEngine.

Any update on this?