Hi guys, I’m trying to build a (maybe quite sophisticated?) hybrid Meteor Cordova app.
The idea is to use native code where it seems to be appropriate, i.e. where I’m not able to accomplish my goals using HTML5 only. As I am a single developer with limited time, I want to focus these UI improvements on iOS first (since I really like Swift, but don’t like Java that much), and rely on the pure HTML5 variant for Android.
For iOS, I started with the Xcode template generated by Meteor and added my Swift extensions there. For performance and user experience reasons, I decided to implement my own startup pages (as standard Meteor Cordova did way too long to load), and I’m loading the Meteor app in its own Webview in the background in the meantime.
This works suprisingly well, so I am quite happy with what I’ve achieved so far. Yet, I’m still struggling with a lot of quirks regarding the hot-code-push functionality (sometimes happens to break the app completely). According to issues on GitHub, I’m quite confident that these problems are not related to my own view controllers (which I derived from Cordova’s, just to be sure I’m not missing something), but of course I cannot be 100% sure.
I also find Meteor’s Cordova documentation quite unsatisfying, as it lacks a lot of information about how to call Cordova plugins correctly, and there is no information about how collaboration with native code is set-up in a best-practice way. Don’t want to blame anyone, it’s still a young project, but I’m getting lots of gray hair due to these issues.
So I am wondering if there are any projects / people out there who would like to share experiences / code samples with me? It would be great to see how other people are using Meteor Cordova in a “non-out-of-the-box” way. So far, I only found this page:
https://www.discovermeteor.com/blog/meteor-cordova-famous-the-chill-way-to-build-apps/
It sounds promising, but unfortunately the guys do not mention how they solved the integration problems they were facing. And I gues they also would not want to disclose their code…
KR, Tom aka Waldgeist