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Win10 PWA Terminology

2018 May 31, 8:26

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.

PermalinkCommentsJS pwa uwp web

Tweet from David Risney

2016 Nov 4, 4:08
@David_Risney Example graph https://raw.githubusercontent.com/david-risney/WinMDGraph/master/examples/3/3.dot.png  of the Windows .Services.Maps namespace
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Retweet of lakey

2015 Aug 3, 2:26
@danbarker Lots more lovely 3D tube maps here: http://bit.ly/1P33Tws 
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(via Streetview Stereographic is Warping Google Maps)

2012 Jan 6, 6:15


(via Streetview Stereographic is Warping Google Maps)

PermalinkCommentsmap photo

Nintendo Game Maps

2011 Sep 28, 10:22They've got maps from your favorite NES games as giant images. I'm using SMB3 1-1 as my desktop background. I've got a four monitor setup now and so its tough to find desktop backgrounds but Mario levels easily cover my whole desktop.PermalinkCommentsgame videogame map nintendo nes

JavaScript & .NET interop via WebBrowser Control

2011 Apr 5, 10:00

For my GeolocMock weekend project I intended to use the Bing Maps API to display a map in a WebBrowser control and allow the user to interact with that to select a location to be consumed by my application. Getting my .NET code to talk to the JavaScript in the WebBrowser control was surprisingly easy.

To have .NET execute JavaScript code you can use the InvokeScript method passing the name of the JavaScript function to execute and an object array of parameters to pass:

this.webBrowser2.Document.InvokeScript("onLocationStateChanged",
new object[] {
latitudeTextBoxText,
longitudeTextBoxText,
altitudeTextBoxText,
uncertaintyTextBoxText
});

The other direction, having JavaScript call into .NET is slightly more complicated but still pretty easy as far as language interop goes. The first step is to mark your assembly as ComVisible so that it can interact with JavaScript via COM. VS had already added a ComVisible declaration to my project I just had to change the value to true.

[assembly: ComVisible(true)]

Next set ObjectForScripting attribute to the object you want to expose to JavaScript.

this.webBrowser2.ObjectForScripting = this.locationState;

Now that object is exposed as window.external in JavaScript and you can call methods on it.

window.external.Set(lat, long, alt, gUncert);

However you don't seem to be able to test for the existence of methods off of it. For example the following JavaScript generates an exception for me even though I have a Set method:

if (window.external && window.external.Set) {
PermalinkCommentsjavascript webbrowser .net technical csharp

GeolocMock Tool - Tell IE9 Where You Are

2011 Apr 3, 12:00

I've made GeolocMock. If your PC has no geolocation devices, IE9 uses a webservice to determine your location. GeolocMock uses FiddlerCore to intercept the response from the webservice and allows the user to replace the location in the response with another. This was a fun weekend project in order to play with FiddlerCore, the W3C Geoloc APIs in IE9, hosting the IE9 WebOC in a .NET app, and the Bing Maps APIs.

PermalinkCommentsfiddler technical geoloc ie9 fiddlercore

Spirit of Indiana (Jones) – syncing HTML5 Video with Maps ✩ Mozilla Hacks – the Web developer blog

2010 Dec 16, 1:12Nice! Indiana Jones style map fade in over video done in HTML5 with video tag, and Google maps API.
PermalinkCommentshtml5 video map technical demo google animation svg

Damn, Tourists! « Burrito Justice

2010 Jun 7, 2:40Maps of where tourists vs locals take photos in major cities like New York, San Francisco, etc. based on geotagged photos on Flickr.
PermalinkCommentsgeolocation geo geography map flickr photo tourist technical visualization

Bing - New Bing Maps Application: Streetside Photos - Bing Maps Blog - Bing Community

2010 Feb 19, 3:20Bing Maps blog post on their integration of Flickr photos onto their street side view. Very coolPermalinkCommentsflickr photo creativecommons geolocation bing microsoft photography map blog geo

Blaise Aguera y Arcas demos augmented-reality maps | Video on TED.com

2010 Feb 18, 4:57Bing Maps TED talk demos integration of various things including photosynth, flickr photos, and live video.PermalinkCommentsvideo microsoft map flickr 3d photosynth bing augmented-reality

sitemaps.org - Protocol

2010 Jan 25, 8:31PermalinkCommentssitemap google xml search web html technical reference

Official Google Blog: Go thataway: Google Maps India learns to navigate like a local

2009 Dec 18, 2:27"...this week we launched an improvement to Google Maps India that describes routes in terms of easy-to-follow landmarks and businesses that are visible along the way. We gathered feedback from users around the world to spark this improvement to our technology, and we thought we'd give you a glimpse at our thinking behind this launch."PermalinkCommentsgoogle map geography geo india

Atlas of True Names

2009 Nov 23, 2:20"The Atlas of True Names reveals the etymological roots, or original meanings, of the familiar terms on today's maps of the World, Europe, the British Isles and the United States. For instance, where you would normally expect to see the Sahara indicated, the Atlas gives you "The Tawny One", derived from Arab. es-sahra “the fawn coloured ,desert”."PermalinkCommentshumor reference map etymology translation atlas geography

PLoS ONE: Clickstream Data Yields High-Resolution Maps of Science

2009 Nov 23, 11:33A map of the sciences generated via science web portals: "Over the course of 2007 and 2008, we collected nearly 1 billion user interactions recorded by the scholarly web portals of some of the most significant publishers, aggregators and institutional consortia...The resulting model was visualized as a journal network that outlines the relationships between various scientific domains and clarifies the connection of the social sciences and humanities to the natural sciences."PermalinkCommentsvia:pskomoroch visualization science map graph

How to Google Maps on Vimeo

2009 Aug 31, 4:53From Ira as part of The Balloon Project "... took the lo-fi diy map making essentials (portable helium tank, party balloons, and a disposable video camera) to Paris, France, where they launched a video camera into the sky not knowing where it would go, and created some very unique aerial cartography of the Place de la Concorde.' I'd love to see this run through photo stitching software like Photosynth and then layered on Google Maps.PermalinkCommentsmap balloon art ira-mowen france paris

Creating Accelerators for Other People's Web Services

2009 Aug 18, 4:19

Before we shipped IE8 there were no Accelerators, so we had some fun making our own for our favorite web services. I've got a small set of tips for creating Accelerators for other people's web services. I was planning on writing this up as an IE blog post, but Jon wrote a post covering a similar area so rather than write a full and coherent blog post I'll just list a few points:

PermalinkCommentstechnical accelerator ie8 ie

mobiForge - Google Maps API on Android

2009 Aug 6, 3:01Tutorial on using the google maps api on androidPermalinkCommentsandroid tutorial google java map maps programming mobile technical

308 - The Pop Vs Soda Map - Strange Maps

2009 May 31, 8:29"When on a hot summer's day you buy a carbonated beverage to quench your thirst, how do you order it? Do you ask for a soda, a pop or something else? That question lay at the basis of an article in the Journal of English Linguistics (Soda or Pop?, #24, 1996) and of a map, showing the regional variation in American English of the names given to that type of drink."PermalinkCommentsmap language visualization statistics english culture soda coke for:hellosarah

Paintmap | Painting the world

2009 May 3, 4:45Google Maps mashup that maps the real world locations featured in famous paintings.PermalinkCommentsvia:mnot painting art google mashup map
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