W3C and WHATWG APIs
Tabris implements a subset of popular W3C/WHATWG standards. Besides providing web developers with familiar APIs, this also enables you to use libraries developed for a browser environment. All APIs reside in the global namespace and do not have to be imported.
window object
In JavaScript there is always an object that represents the global scope. All global variables are members of this object. For compatibility this object is available as window, but global is the actual global object in Tabris.js. For example, the tabris object can be accessed either via tabris or global.tabris or window.tabris.
console object
The Tabris console object implements a subset of the WHATWG Console standard. As in the browser, messages can be logged to the developer console with different methods indicating different log levels:
console.log("A log message");
console.warn("A warning message");
console.error("An error Message");
console.trace();
Calling console.error will also cause a message to pop up (even if the developer console is closed), but it won’t interrupt script execution. If the application is loaded via tabris serve the output is also shown on the developer machine.
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Timer
Tabris supports the timer methods setTimeout, setInterval, clearTimeout and clearInterval. Passing strings to setTimeout or setInterval to evaluate is NOT supported.
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Fetch
Tabris supports the fetch() function to make HTTP request and to read resources that are part of the application.
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Blob
A blob represent raw data that may be created from various sources and can also be read into an ArrayBuffer or converted to a string. Blobs work with fetch, XMLHttpRequest, FileSystem and WebSocket APIs. Tabris does not support the stream() and slice() methods of Blob.
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File
File is a subclass of Blob with additional name and lastModified fields. It is supported mainly to satisfy the FormData standard.
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FormData
FormData can be used to send messages of the multipart/form-data MIME type via fetch() or XMLHttpRequest.
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XMLHttpRequest
Tabris also supports XMLHttpRequest, though fetch() is recommended for convenience. Only asynchronous requests are supported in Tabris.js. Attempting a synchronous request will cause an error.
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WebSocket
WebSockets are an advanced technology that makes it possible to open an interactive communication session between the user’s client and a server. With this API, you can send messages to a server and receive event-driven responses without having to poll the server for a reply.
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Worker
Workers are a simple mechanism to run a script in a background thread. The worker thread can perform tasks without interfering with the user interface. In addition, they can perform I/O using XMLHttpRequest or the file system api. Once created, a worker can send messages to the JavaScript code that created it by posting messages to an event handler specified by that code (and vice versa).
The tabris support for workers allows to send data to a running worker via the worker.postMessage(data, transferList) method. The transferList is ignored. The types supported in the data field are:
nullundefinedstringnumberBooleanObjectArrayImageDataArrayBufferArrayBufferView/TypedArray
Only the following Tabris.js APIs can be used in a worker:
- localStorage
- App (Except:
restart(),close(),closeKeyboard()andidleTimeoutEnabled) - Crypto
- Device
- file system
- XHR/fetch
- TextEncoder
- WebSocket
- Worker
Widget APIs are unavailable. Calling any unsupported APIs has no effect.
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Persistent Storage
Tabris supports the global object localStorage, which allows storing key-value pairs in a persistent store. Both keys and values are stored as strings.
Note that the “storage” event is not supported. For debugging purposes the contents of the localStorage can be inspected using console.dirxml()[./api/console.md#dirxml]. On iOS, there is an additional object secureStorage available in the global scope. This is a drop-in replacement for localStorage that keeps data in the encrypted iOS Keychain.
The
localStorageis only meant to store relatively short strings. To store larger amounts of data it is recommended to use the cordovaFileSystemplugin.
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Canvas Context
The Canvas widget provides a “2D Context” object that implements a subset of the HTML5 canvas.
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Random Source (Crypto)
The global crypto object provides an implementation of the RandomSource interface that can be used to generate cryptographically secure random numbers.
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