Mobile / Web · 2018-01-18

Turn your JavaScript code into native mobile apps with ‘Jasonette Agent’

javascript

‘Jasonette Agent’ allows developers to build cross-platform native apps by simply using a JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) markup. You can build both native iOS & Android apps without going through the hassle of compiling & building, by just loading a JSON over HTTP. It will then get interpreted into native APIs on the fly.

It’s a layer on top of Jasonette, which the Site describes as a ‘JSON browser that builds native components’. Jasonette works similarly to how a Web browser turns HTML into a Web page, by turning JSON into Android & iOS native components. Jasonette Agents are akin to microservices which are embedded into a frontend app.

The process can be described as:

  • User interacts with native core
  • Background JavaScript containers for multiple tasks are spawned by the core
  • The core & agents communicate through JSON-RPC

In other words, Jasonette Agents are actually invisible background JavaScript execution environments. They’re implemented internally in WKWebView on iOS & WebView on Android. Users never get to interact directly with any agents as they’re optimized to run in the background, so users interact with the core native app engine with JSON-RPC.

You can do anything that you can do in JavaScript by plugging in it in as an Agent. You can immediately use Agents to build on top of many kinds of Web technologies, like GraphQL, IPFS, TensorFlow, Deepstream.io, Firebase, Google Analytics, WebSockets, Pusher, Heap, Angular, PubNub, Vue.js, HTML5…

If you already have a functional Web app running, you can plug it into Jasonette as an agent & make it work as a “backend” to Jasonette’s native frontend. Multiple agents are supported, so agents bring multi-threading to Jasonette & multiple concurrent tasks can be run. The tasks are offloaded as agents to run concurrently & they report back through events.

Jasonette & Jasonette Agent are free & open-source software under an MIT license & you can use it anywhere as JSON & a functioning web server to start using it. It’s available on GitHub here.

– This is a startup profile based on publicly available material & not a review – 
Image Credit: Jasonette.com

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