In a mobile world, there is still a debate about whether to develop HTML5 or native applications. People who favor HTML5 will develop an application with HTML5 and then run the application with a UI wrapper written in native code, while the opposite approach is to write the application completely with native code. But how about the desktop world? We will try the HTML5 approach in this chapter, and you can have your own opinion about this debate yourself!
The concept of running HTML5 applications is like running the application in a stripped-down web browser as a wrapper. The UI wrapper for our HTML5 application will be written in Vala, using the GTK+ flavor of the famous WebKit layout engine, which is called WebKitGTK+. In this chapter, we will not only learn how to run our HTML5 applications inside a UI wrapper, but will also learn to use GNOME platform as the middleware. Specifically, our topics for this chapter are as follows:
Let's do this right now!