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Try Crosswalk

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Elliot Smith edited this page Sep 4, 2013 · 39 revisions

Crosswalk is not ready for production application development, but if you'd like to try it, here are instructions for packaging your HTML5/CSS/JS application with a copy of the runtime. We humbly present an early milestone on the Application Runtime. This version is designed to be shared among multiple applications. Except sharing isn't implemented yet as it's not possible to install it OS-wise. An early milestone- exactly.

If you are a C/C++ developer and want to develop your own runtime built with Crosswalk, reference Crosswalk Build Instructions for instructions on how to build your own binary.

Get Crosswalk

You can download the pre-built binaries that are packaged into a .zip file (~30M) from:

https://github.com/crosswalk-project/crosswalk/releases

Install Crosswalk

On Windows

On Windows, the zip package contains:

  • Crosswalk launcher - xwalk.exe (~33M)
  • Crosswalk packaged resources - xwalk.pak (~5M)
  • Unicode and i18n support library - icudt.dll (~9M)
  • EGL/OpenGLES support libraries - libEGL.dll, libGLESv2.dll (~1M)
  • Installer creation script (.bat or .sh)

For a quick 'smoke test', unzip the file into a directory and try to run:

xwalk.exe http://www.google.com

You should see a native app window that renders the www.google.com page. Reference Crosswalk Command Line Options to see which options are provided by this early binary.

On Linux

  1. Download the binary for your platform from the URL in Get Crosswalk.

  2. Unpack the zip file.

  3. Move to the unzipped directory: cd xwalk-linux

  4. Smoke test with a known URL, e.g. ./xwalk http://google.com/

On Android

You will need to install adb, and use it to connect your device to your development machine.

Once you've done that, follow these steps to install crosswalk. (In this example, we were installing onto an HTC One X.)

  1. Download the binary for Android from the URL in Get Crosswalk.

  2. Install the xwalk binary on the device (here we're assuming the xwalk-android.zip file is the ~/Downloads directory on a Linux machine):

    host$ cd ~/Downloads
host$ mkdir xwalk; cd xwalk
host$ unzip ../xwalk-android.zip
host$ adb shell ‘pm set-install-location 2’
host$ adb install xwalk-android/apks/XWalkCoreShell.apk
    629 KB/s (18634788 bytes in 28.899s)
    pkg: /data/local/tmp/XWalkCoreShell.apk
Success

  3. Go to the application list and locate the XWalkCoreShell app. Run it.

  4. Once it's running, give it a URI to run by entering it into the address bar at the top of the application. This can either be an absolute URL, e.g.

    http://google.com/

    or the location of an app unpacked on the device, e.g.

    file:///tmp/myapp/index.html

On Tizen 2.1

  1. Log into the device as root by default: sdb root on.
  2. Push the crosswalk RPM to the device: sdb push [crosswalk].rpm /tmp
  3. Push the crosswalk Tizen extensions RPM to the device: sdb push [crosswalk extensions].rpm /tmp
  4. Install the RPMs on the device: sdb shell then rpm -i /tmp/[crosswalk].rpm /tmp/[crosswalk extensions].rpm.
  5. From there, you can launch: xwalk http://www.google.com
  6. You will be able to create an xwalk icon on the home screen (to launch xwalk) later. (It is a 'work in progress'.)

Package Your Web App

Given a web app written in HTML5 and Javascript with an index.html entry page, this binary allows you to package it into a native app installer.

You can also pack a manifest.json file with your application. Reference Crosswalk manifest to see how to write a manifest file.

For Windows Installer

The create_windows_installer.bat contained in the Crosswalk binaries is used to package a web app into a native app installer.

A prerequisite for this installer is the Wix toolset. Download the toolset from http://wixtoolset.org/.

Run create_windows_installer.bat --help for instructions on how to use Wix.

usage: create_windows_installer.bat [options] [app_path]

The following options are supported:

app_path                Path to your Crosswalk application. If not specified, the
                          current directory is used.
--wix_bin_path=<path>   Path to Wix toolset binaries. If not specified, the
                          script will try to find them through PATH
--xwalk_path=<path>     Path to Crosswalk binaries. If not specified, the script
                          will try to find them through PATH, the app path, or
                          the current directory.
--app_name=<name>       Name of the application. If not specified, the name
                          of the application directory is used.
--version=<version>     The version of the application, defaults to 1.0.0
--app_arguments=<args>  Arguments that will be passed into Crosswalk executable.
                          If not specified, "index.html" is used. For example,
                          "--allow-file-access-from-files [INSTALLDIR]src/index.html"
--out=<pathname>        File Path of the output installer file, defaults to the
                          current directory with %app_name%.msi as its name.
--publisher=<name>      The manufacturer of this application, defaults to "Me"
--help                  Print this message
Example Usage
  create_windows_installer.bat webapps-scientific-calculator-master --wix_bin_path="C:\Program Files (x86)\WiX Toolset v3.7\bin" --xwalk_path="C:\Users\username\Desktop\xwalk paking\xwalk-win32"

For Linux Installer

The create_linux_installer.sh contained is used to create native installer in RPM or DEB package format through checkinstall utility. You MUST install checkinstall firstly. Run sudo apt-get install checkinstall on Linux system.

The usage is similar with that on Windows, but without Wix:

usage: create_linux_installer.sh [options] [app_path]

This script is used to create a standalone installer for web app. It
depends on checkinstall and crosswalk to function properly.
The following options are supported:

     app_path                Path to your web application. If not specified, the
                               current directory is used.
     --xwalk_path=<path>     Path to Crosswalk binaries. If not specified, the script
                               will try to find them through PATH, the app path, or
                               the current directory.
     --app_name=<name>       Name of the application. If not specified, the name
                               of the application directory is used.
     --version=<version>     The version of the application, defaults to 1.0.0
     --app_index=<path>      Path of app index file, relative to app_path. If not
                               specified, index.html is used.
     --out=<path>            Path of the output package file, defaults to
                               /tmp/xwalk_build/<app_name>
     --publisher=<name>      The manufacturer of this application, defaults to Me
     --help                  Print this message
Example Usage

TBD

Debug Your Web App

Crosswalk also enables remote debugging to a separate instance of a Chrome browser.

  • Step 1: Install Google's Chrome browser from www.google.com/chrome/‎,
  • Step 2: Launch Crosswalk with remote debugging option xwalk.exe --remote-debugging-port=9222 index.html
  • Step 3: Open localhost:9222 in the Chrome browser, and you will see the inspectable pages in Chrome tab.
  • Step 4: Click the inspectable page to open the Web Inspector UI to start debugging.

Known Issues

  • Network proxy set by environment doesn't take effect on Linux. Instead, you have to set the system wide network proxy.
  • Cannot play HTML5 video. It is because the ffmpeg library is not included in the Crosswalk binaries. Set Tips#1 for using ffmpeg to play HTML5 video in Crosswalk.
  • CSS3D and WebGL can not work on Windows if DirectX End-User Runtime is not installed on your system. Go to here to install DirectX End-User Runtime on your system.

Tips

  1. How to enable multimedia in Crosswalk binary release?

See Enable Multimedia in Crosswalk

  1. How to debug Javascript code in window.onload?

Launch xwalk.exe with --remote-debugging-port=9222, and open localhost:9222 in Chrome browser to start debugging and set breakpoint inside window.onload body, press F5 in Chrome to refresh the Web inspector page. As expected, your app will be paused at the breakpoint you set.

  1. How to specify the app icon?

You can use --app-icon command line option or use favicon metatag inside <head> tag: `

`
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