Technical Reference – Intel® HTML5 App Porter Tool - BETA
Introduction
The Intel® HTML5 App Porter Tool - BETA is an application
that helps mobile application developers to port native iOS* code into
HTML5, by automatically translating portions of the original code into
HTML5. This tool is not a complete solution to automatically port 100%
of iOS* applications, but instead it speeds up the porting process by
translating as much code and artifacts as possible.
It helps in the translation of the following artifacts:
- Objective-C* (and a subset of C) source code into JavaScript
- iOS* API types and calls into JavaScript/HTML5 objects and calls
- Layouts of views inside Xcode* Interface Builder (XIB) files into HTML + CSS files
- Xcode* project files into Microsoft* Visual Studio* 2012 projects
This document provides a high-level explanation about how the
tool works and some details about supported features. This overview will
help you determine how to process the different parts of your project
and take the best advantage from the current capabilities.
How does it work?
The Intel® HTML5 App Porter Tool - BETA is essentially a
source-to-source translator that can handle a number of conversions from
Objective-C* into JavaScript/HTML5 including the translation of APIs
calls. A number of open source projects are used as foundation for the
conversion including a modified version of Clang front-end, LayerD framework and jQuery Mobile* for widgets rendering in the translated source code.
Translation of Objective-C* into JavaScript
At a high level, the transformation pipeline looks like this:
This pipeline follows the following stages:
- Parsing of Objective-C* files into an intermediate AST (Abstract Syntax Tree).
- Mapping of supported iOS* API calls into equivalent JavaScript calls.
- Generation of placeholder definitions for unsupported API calls.
- Final generation of JavaScript and HTML5 files.
About coverage of API mappings
Mapping APIs from iOS* SDK into JavaScript is a task that involves a
good deal of effort. The iOS* APIs have thousands of methods and
hundreds of types. Fortunately, a rather small amount of those APIs are
in fact heavily used by most applications. The graph below conceptually
shows how many APIs need to be mapped in order to have certain level of
translation for API calls .
Currently, the Intel® HTML5 App Porter Tool - BETA supports the most used types and methods from:
- UIKit framework
- Foundation framework
Additionally, it supports a few classes of other frameworks such
as CoreGraphics. For further information on supported APIs refer to the
list of supported APIs.
