A sugar web activity is an activity developed using the standard web technologies: HTML, JavaScript and CSS. They are called "web" because of the technology used but they run off-line just fine. The activities are run within the Sugar Shell, an activity runtime built on standard browser technology, to render the display, assist with events, and handle JavaScript.
As standard webapps, they are self-contained and run in any modern web browser. But the focus is on running them bound to Sugar services that provide the unique features of Sugar.
The web is evolving very fast to provide the same functionality to webapps that standard desktop applications have. Web activities should be developed using standard web technologies as much as possible. For example, if there is a need to take a picture from the device camera, and that is possible with web standards, then those should be used. If that is not possible, the activity should communicate with the Sugar services to take the picture.
https://github.com/sugarlabs/sugar-web
It includes the tools that the activity developer can use to make an activity. The Sugar services are delivered as a JavaScript framework, which supports common application-level functions, UI widgets and native services.
A copy of the library is contained in each activity.
Current Sugar GTK can already run web activities out of the box. It opens a chrome-less window with a WebKitGTK view, and the web activity is loaded inside.
The JavaScript interface to connect web activities and Sugar GTK is being developed. The interface ends up calling the same bits as GTK activities. It uses WebSockets for the communication between JavaScript and Python code.
There is research going on about running web activities on Android. The activity source is bundled in an Android application with one component: an Android activity (not to confuse with our activity term). The Android activity is composed of a chrome-less WebKit view, and the web activity is loaded inside. This is the same as other webapps on Android do.
The Android activity exposes a JavaScript object that the JavaScript libraries inside the web activity can use to communicate with the Java application. The application can then communicate with the Sugar shell application and respond to the web activity executing JavaScript.
The Sugar shell on Android is a separate process, runs in its own application with one component: an Android bound service. The inter-process communication is made sending Message objects.
Many Android activities can be connected to the Sugar shell. The first one starts it, and the last one stops it. They bind to the shell sending an Intent message, for which the shell has an Intent filter that matches.
The Sugar shell on Android should implement all of the Sugar features, unlike Sugar GTK shell that only needs to connect to the current features. But both take advantage of sharing the same JavaScript interface. The interface should be platform agnostic.
The standalone web activities are rendered in any modern web browser. They might have limited functionality but should be as functional as possible. The same libraries as with the other web activities are used.
Modularization of JavaScript code is handled with RequireJS which provides the AMD specification (Asynchronous Module Definition).
Package management and creation of activities from a template is handled with Volo.
Unit testing of JavaScript code is done with the Jasmine framework.
Installation of JavaScript tools is done with Node.js.