cia - Dave's Blog

Folks familiar with JavaScript UWP apps in Win10 have often been confused by what PWAs in Win10 actually are. TLDR: PWAs in Win10 are simply JavaScript UWP apps. The main difference between these JS UWP Apps and our non-PWA JS UWP apps are our target end developer audience, and how we get Win10 PWAs into the Microsoft Store. See this Win10 blog post on PWAs on Win10 for related info.

Web App

On the web a subset of web sites are web apps. These are web sites that have app like behavior - that is a user might call it an app like Outlook, Maps or Gmail. And they may also have a W3C app manifest.

A subset of web apps are progressive web apps. Progressive web apps are web apps that have a W3C app manifest and a service worker. Various OSes are beginning to support PWAs as first class apps on their platform. This is true for Win10 as well in which PWAs are run as a WWA.

Windows Web App

In Win10 a WWA (Windows Web App) is an unofficial term for a JavaScript UWP app. These are UWP apps so they have an AppxManifest.xml, they are packaged in an Appx package, they run in an App Container, they use WinRT APIs, and are installed via the Microsoft Store. Specific to WWAs though, is that the AppxManifest.xml specifies a StartPage attribute identifying some HTML content to be used as the app. When the app is activated the OS will create a WWAHost.exe process that hosts the HTML content using the EdgeHtml rendering engine.

Packaged vs Hosted Web App

Within that we have a notion of a packaged web app and an HWA (hosted web app). There's no real technical distinction for the end developer between these two. The only real difference is whether the StartPage identifies remote HTML content on the web (HWA), or packaged HTML content from the app's appx package (packaged web app). An end developer may create an app that is a mix of these as well, with HTML content in the package and HTML content from the web. These terms are more like ends on a continuum and identifying two different developer scenarios since the underlying technical aspect is pretty much identical.

Win10 PWA

Win10 PWAs are simply HWAs that specify a StartPage of a URI for a PWA on the web. These are still JavaScript UWP apps with all the same behavior and abilities as other UWP apps. We have two ways of getting PWAs into the Microsoft Store as Win10 PWAs. The first is PWA Builder which is a tool that helps PWA end developers create and submit to the Microsoft Store a Win10 PWA appx package. The second is a crawler that runs over the web looking for PWAs which we convert and submit to the Store using an automated PWA Builder-like tool to create a Win10 PWA from PWAs on the web (see Welcoming PWAs to Win10 for more info). In both cases the conversion involves examining the PWAs W3C app manifest and producing a corresponding AppxManifest.xml. Not all features supported by AppxManifest.xml are also available in the W3c app manifest. But the result of PWA Builder can be a working starting point for end developers who can then update the AppxManifest.xml as they like to support features like share targets or others not available in W3C app manifests.

MSDN covers the topic of JavaScript and WinRT type conversions provided by Chakra (JavaScript Representation of Windows Runtime Types and Considerations when Using the Windows Runtime API), but for the questions I get about it I’ll try to lay out some specifics of that discussion more plainly. I’ve made a TL;DR JavaScript types and WinRT types summary table.

Chakra, the JavaScript engine powering the Edge browser and JavaScript Windows Store apps, does the work to project WinRT into JavaScript. It is responsible for, among other things, converting back and forth between JavaScript types and WinRT types. Some basics are intuitive, like a JavaScript string is converted back and forth with WinRT’s string representation. For other basic types check out the MSDN links at the top of the page. For structs, interface instances, class instances, and objects things are more complicated.

A struct, class instance, or interface instance in WinRT is projected into JavaScript as a JavaScript object with corresponding property names and values. This JavaScript object representation of a WinRT type can be passed into other WinRT APIs that take the same underlying type as a parameter. This JavaScript object is special in that Chakra keeps a reference to the underlying WinRT object and so it can be reused with other WinRT APIs.

However, if you start with plain JavaScript objects and want to interact with WinRT APIs that take non-basic WinRT types, your options are less plentiful. You can use a plain JavaScript object as a WinRT struct, so long as the property names on the JavaScript object match the WinRT struct’s. Chakra will implicitly create an instance of the WinRT struct for you when you call a WinRT method that takes that WinRT struct as a parameter and fill in the WinRT struct’s values with the values from the corresponding properties on your JavaScript object.

// C# WinRT component
        public struct ExampleStruct
        {
            public string String;
            public int Int;
        }

        public sealed class ExampleStructContainer
        {
            ExampleStruct value;
            public void Set(ExampleStruct value)
            {
                this.value = value;
            }

            public ExampleStruct Get()
            {
                return this.value;
            }
        }

// JS code
        var structContainer = new ExampleWinRTComponent.ExampleNamespace.ExampleStructContainer();
        structContainer.set({ string: "abc", int: 123 });
        console.log("structContainer.get(): " + JSON.stringify(structContainer.get()));
        // structContainer.get(): {"string":"abc","int":123}

You cannot have a plain JavaScript object and use it as a WinRT class instance or WinRT interface instance. Chakra does not provide such a conversion even with ES6 classes.

You cannot take a JavaScript object with arbitrary property names that are unknown at compile time and don’t correspond to a specific WinRT struct and pass that into a WinRT method. If you need to do this, you have to write additional JavaScript code to explicitly convert your arbitrary JavaScript object into an array of property name and value pairs or something else that could be represented in WinRT.

However, the other direction you can do. An instance of a Windows.Foundation.Collections.IPropertySet implementation in WinRT is projected into JavaScript as a JavaScript object with property names and values corresponding to the key and value pairs in the IPropertySet. In this way you can project a WinRT object as a JavaScript object with arbitrary property names and types. But again, the reverse is not possible. Chakra will not convert an arbitrary JavaScript object into an IPropertySet.

// C# WinRT component
        public sealed class PropertySetContainer
        {
            private Windows.Foundation.Collections.IPropertySet otherValue = null;

            public Windows.Foundation.Collections.IPropertySet other
            {
                get
                {
                    return otherValue;
                }
                set
                {
                    otherValue = value;
                }
            }
        }

        public sealed class PropertySet : Windows.Foundation.Collections.IPropertySet
        {
            private IDictionary map = new Dictionary();

            public PropertySet()
            {
                map.Add("abc", "def");
                map.Add("ghi", "jkl");
                map.Add("mno", "pqr");
            }
            // ... rest of PropertySet implementation is simple wrapper around the map member.
            

// JS code
    var propertySet = new ExampleWinRTComponent.ExampleNamespace.PropertySet();
    console.log("propertySet: " + JSON.stringify(propertySet));
    // propertySet: {"abc":"def","ghi":"jkl","mno":"pqr"}

    var propertySetContainer = new ExampleWinRTComponent.ExampleNamespace.PropertySetContainer();
    propertySetContainer.other = propertySet;
    console.log("propertySetContainer.other: " + JSON.stringify(propertySetContainer.other));
    // propertySetContainer.other: {"abc":"def","ghi":"jkl","mno":"pqr"}

    try {
        propertySetContainer.other = { "123": "456", "789": "012" };
    }
    catch (e) {
        console.error("Error setting propertySetContainer.other: " + e);
        // Error setting propertySetContainer.other: TypeError: Type mismatch
}

There’s also no way to implicitly convert a DOM object into a WinRT type. If you want to write third party WinRT code that interacts with the DOM, you must do so indirectly and explicitly in JavaScript code that is interacting with your third party WinRT. You’ll have to extract the information you want from your DOM objects to pass into WinRT methods and similarly have to pass messages out from WinRT that say what actions the JavaScript should perform on the DOM.