Nitrox - an iPhone HTML/JS Application Environment

For all the divers in the house...what's better than AIR? NITROX!

A Cocoa/Objective-C wrapper for Javascript applications on the iPhone which provides access to native iPhone functions.

See http://code.google.com/p/nitrox for more information.

How to Use Nitrox

Nitrox is not a browser. It is intended to be used as a library and wrapper for iPhone applications written with HTML and Javascript.

The underlying mechanism is the iPhone UIKit's UIWebView. As of iPhone SDK 2.1, most of the device-specific functionality of the iPhone is not exposed to Javascript programs. The goal of Nitrox is to make that functionality available.

To create a Nitrox application, you should create a new Cocoa Touch application in Xcode just as you would for a pure Objective-C application. Then you will follow the steps described in INSTALL.md to make Nitrox available to your main application.

In addition, you will include a "web" directory with the application which contains your HTML and Javascript files.

You can extend Nitrox with your own Objective-C functions. You do not need to use Nitrox for your entire application. You can use it for only certain views or functions, and use pure Objective-C for others.

Similar systems

Phonegap (http://www.phonegap.com/) is the most similar. The main difference between Phonegap and Nitrox is that Nitrox uses a local XMLHTTPRequest/Ajax connection to invoke Objective-C from Javascript.

See http://code.google.com/p/nitrox/wiki/Performance for a comparison and performance analysis.

Source Code

You can grab source code from Github at the following URL:

 http://github.com/rsanders/nitrox/tree/master

Release Notes

v0.2 - 2008-10-06

Working:

• Ajax-based invocation of functions (slower but more reliable and optionally synchronous)
• Accelerometer
• Location functions
• Vibrate function
• System functions including exiting and openURL
• UIDevice property access
• Loading of Javascript files accessible via XMLHTTPRequest
• Simple (explicit, not automatic) proxying of GET requests for non-local URLs... could be used in some places where XMLHTTPRequest is used.
• Logging
• General Notification subscription and sending
• Callbacks to JS for accel, location, orientation, notifications

Testing:

• Faster but less general syscall method using UIWebView delegate interception rather than Ajax / HTTP
• Much faster and more general and more powerful method using WebKit native Obj-C bridge; not currently formally supported and probably App Store poison. (works, though)