The Shape of Everything
A website mostly about Mac stuff, written by August "Gus" Mueller
» Acorn
» Retrobatch
» Mastodon
» Micro.blog
» Instagram
» Github
» Maybe Pizza?
» Archives
» Feed
» Micro feed
April 27, 2011

PhobosLab: iOS and JavaScript - For Real This time!

"So what's so special about these two games now? They don't use PhoneGap or Titanium. They don't even use a UIWebView. Instead, they bypass the iPhone's browser altogether and use Apple's JavaScript interpreter (JavaScriptCore) directly. All graphics are rendered with OpenGL instead of in a browser window and all sound and music is played back with OpenAL instead of… well, having no sound at all."

Awesomtasitc. Dominic was able to ship two apps on iOS this way! JavaScriptCore is private on iOS (it's public on Mac OS X), so Dominic had to compile JSC into his project. I knew this was possible in theory- but since I wasn't aware of any apps taking this approach, I assumed Apple was rejecting all attempts. I'm glad this approach now has Apple's blessing.

This might make it possible to use JSTalk on iOS, which would be a welcome addition for me.

Even better would be if Apple would make JavaScriptCore public, and even turn on the Nitro JIT for everyone. I suppose I should file a bug on that.