Use V8 JavaScript engine to execute JS lib without web view

Question

I am developing a JavaScript component which is responsible for making requests to the server and dispatching results to the UI. By doing this in JavaScript, I am able to use my component in several types of UI: Android app, iOS app, desktop app (QT), web app...

All these UI have instantiated a web view, so my component is started when the UI loads the dedicated URL (webview.load("file://myfirstWebPage.html")).

This first web page loads all the JavaScript components, and when it's done, the UI is able to make some requests to the JavaScript component, which makes a request to the server and when it has the response, it dispatches it back to the client (UI Android, UI iOS ...)

This architecture works fine, but I would like to know if there is another way to load the JavaScript component without using a web view on each client?

Can the V8 engine help me?

Answer 1

If I'm understanding your question, you're looking for a way to execute JavaScript across many platforms (iOS, Android, etc.) without the use of a WebView. The solution will be platform-specific, since even the underlying WebView implementations are different for each platform.

For Android, so long as the device ships with V8, you can create a new V8 Context via its API and use that to execute your JavaScript. The device must actually ship with V8. This answer may help you further.

For iOS, which uses JavaScriptCore, recent developments in iOS7 have been made to allow you load and run arbitrary JavaScript code. Read more here.

Answer 2

For the Android part. I used J2V8 JavaScript library. It is a Java wrapper of Google's V8 JavaScript engine. See here for more details.