Description:

Get acquainted with Crosswalk, an alternative WebView for Android built on the foundation of Chromium. Crosswalk helps you more easily deploy web apps across multiple versions of Android, while still offering the latest features and performance gains from Chromium.

As an example you can create web apps with the latest Material Design style using Polymer and deploy that to versions older than Android 5.0 Lollipop, as well as run WebGL enabled games.

HTML5 has been adopted by many developers for its advantages such as straight-forward integration with cloud services, flexible layout with responsive design, and cutting edge technologies such as WebRTC, WebGL, and Canvas. However, using the latest web standards has been challenging on Android because the ecosystem is heterogeneous and fragmented with various versions in use. Deploying on popular but dated Android versions such as 4.0 is often complicated, as the integrated WebView may have performance limitations and is lacking important features. Application authors are then restricted to the smallest common featureset. With Crosswalk, a Chromium-based HTML5 framework developed by Intel, those limitations can be overcome. Crosswalk offers you a way to bundle the Chromium web engine with your app and deploy it across all Android 4.x versions. On top of solving portability issues, Crosswalk adds features (SysApps and Presentation API, SIMD, Manifest support) and optimizations for web app developers.

During the webcast presentation we will demonstrate how easy it is to package and deploy your application on Android and how well existing tools such as Cordova work with Crosswalk.

Come and find out how your HTML5 applications can run better than ever on Android

Audience level: Beginner-Intermediate

About Alexis Menard

Alexis Menard is a software engineer working at Intel out of Brazil as part of the Open Source Technology Center. His main focus is on the ever evolving Web Platform, which includes work on W3C standards as well as Blink/Chromium. In the latter projects, he serves as both developer and code reviewer. Alexis is also working on Crosswalk, an HTML5 runtime/webview for Android and Tizen where he does a bit of everything, including industry evangelism. Prior to Intel, Alexis worked on QtWebKit and WebKit itself at the Brazilian Nokia research center known as INdT. Before moving to Brazil, Alexis worked out of Norway, mostly on the Qt framework as a part of Nokia (former Trolltech). He is also a former KDE contributor where he contributed mostly to Plasma, the desktop shell of KDE.

Twitter: @darktears