Meteor 1.3 *early beta* Cordova now available

announce
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As you may know, we’ve started the process towards Meteor 1.3 last month with a beta release of the modules support and related features.

Another area of improvement for Meteor 1.3 is the Cordova integration. Because we don’t want to entangle this too much with the modules work we’ve decided to release these changes as a separate beta for now.

The highlights of the improvements are:

  • Dependencies have been upgraded to Cordova 5.4.1, Cordova iOS 4.0.1 and Cordova Android 5.0.0
  • On iOS, we now use WKWebView by default, which should greatly improve JavaScript performance
  • The file serving and hot code push plugin has been completely rewritten for reliability and performance (in this first beta, hot code push has not yet been implemented for Android)

Please comment here if you have questions about how things are supposed to work. Comment on the GitHub issue about bugs that you find, or missing features that you need.

Announcement with more details about the changes and instructions about updating to the beta version:

15 Likes
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Great job, thx. I think the mobile part of Meteor is very important !

For me the most import thing / issue / feature is: Is it now possible in a mobile meteor app to access the local files (pics, music, videos) of the mobile phone ?

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Awesome to see progress on this. Will definitely try that beta out. Thanks a lot for your work, especially on the HCP!

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Not yet, but it is on the list for the next beta.

3 Likes
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Cool, I made a quick test with new cordova release.

Just create a starter project with Meteor 1.21 and Meteor 1.3-beta cordova
meteor create test121 / test13
meteor add-platform android
meteor run android-device

App Size including data with 1.21 : 7.66 MB
App Size including data with 1.3 : 1.56 MB

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6

Any chance for Windows support for Cordova in the near future? :smile:

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I think the difference in app size is because the old hot code push mechanism required cordova-plugin-file and cordova-plugin-file-transfer.

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There is a pull request for Windows support that looks good, so I have high hopes!

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Release 1.3-cordova-beta.2 is now available. This fixes a bug with Content-Security-Policy that disallowed loading of external scripts, and adds local file system access on iOS.

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Release 1.3-cordova-beta.3 is now available. This release adds local file access for Android, where we now serve apps from file://app/ instead of localhost.

It also adds experimental support for Android development on Windows, thanks to @sedouard’s pull request. If you’re a Windows user, please give this release a try and let us know what is or isn’t working for you.

2 Likes
11

this is very cool. morechars

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Release 1.3-cordova-beta.4 is now available. This includes hot code push support for Android!

Other changes include:

  • This beta now also includes the changes in the 1.3 modules beta, so you may want to refer to https://github.com/meteor/meteor/issues/5788 for more information about those.
  • Cordova has been upgraded to 6.0.0 and Cordova Android to 5.1.0. I’ve also updated the pinned plugins to the latest versions.
  • I’ve reverted the change to file://app/ on Android made in the previous beta, because of issues with file:// URLs that do not seem fixable. So we now serve files from http://localhost:<port> on both iOS and Android. I hope to reenable local file access on Android again in a later beta.
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Do you still need Windows testers? I would be willing to invest a lot of time in a Cordova app for our startup but we don’t have time to learn the best practices (I’ve seen before it’s not as easy as flipping a switch). Any chance meteor guide material will be out soon?

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The 1.3 beta includes support for building Android apps on Windows, so it would be great if you could try it out.

Yes, I plan to work on the mobile section of the guide next, it should be done before we release 1.3.

1 Like
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Release 1.3-cordova-beta.5 is now available. This release includes recent fixes made on the modules branch, reenables local file access on Android, and updates pinned versions of some core plugins.

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There is a new combined 1.3 beta available:

2 Likes