In the past, I was using Intel XDK, PhoneGap Build, and Cocoonjs to build a native app.
But now, all these 3 solutions are gone.
Nowadays, you have to choose between Capacitor and Cordova. Cordova is easy to use, as it just needs one config.xml file. Capacitor is more modern, but you have to deal with, at least some, native code.
Why not combine the simplicity of Cordova’s config.xml and the modern Capacitor into one package that compiles in the cloud?
Well, that’s what I’m about to do. Please have a look:
Really cool demo!! Thanks for sharing this out. Scaffolding out a quick poc with this can be made super quick. Also nicely bridges a gap for those more familiar with a raw web development environments vs the current framework/library rich trend.
Getting your devices UDID, settings up certificates, installing ad-hoc app on your device and publishing it to the app store. All without the need of a mac, directly in the browser!
Capacitor creator here. If you want to make it easier to automate configuration (say, of AndroidManifest.xml) you can now use a tool we built called Trapeze to do that. It’s similar to config.xml in Cordova but more powerful and more explicit (you only modify the project when you want to and you can see all the changes that will be made before you make them): trapeze.dev
I’m well aware of trapeze. Actually we spoke before in #67.
At this moment, I’m still using @capacitor/configure (predecessor of trapeze). html2app uses a fancy wrapper around @capacitor/configure, to make it easily work in a ci/cd pipeline.
Btw, great work on configure and trapeze. Really like this declarative configuration for building mobile apps.