Glue to native

Webview Bundle is designed to avoid being tied to any specific native platform or framework. Write your familiar web application code once, and a single core lets you integrate it the same way across multiple platforms and frameworks.

A core written in Rust

The core crate (wvb) is written in Rust and designed to run across multiple platforms.

The core crate provides the following:

• Read and write the .wvb bundle format
• Manage bundle sources (builtin and remote)
• Download bundles from a remote
• Remote updater
• Protocol handling (serve bundles over a custom scheme, with GET, HEAD, and range request support)
• Integrity and signature verification

Multi-platform and multi-environment support

To support multiple platforms and environments, the wvb crate ships with bindings. Each binding exposes the API of the wvb core crate as-is, so you use the same API across different platforms and environments.

• Node.js
  • Uses a native addon built with napi.rs that binds the Rust code to N-API.
  • The N-API version is 8; for compatible Node.js versions, see the Node.js docs.
• Android/iOS
  • Uses uniffi to generate Kotlin/Swift bindings from the Rust code.
  • The generated bindings are published as part of the Android and iOS libraries, respectively.
• Deno
  • Uses the Deno FFI API to load the library dynamically.

See the full API reference here.

Glue to native

The core intercepts the webview's network requests, reads resources from the bundle, and responds. On Android, for example, you override WebViewClient.shouldInterceptRequest to hand the request to the core's protocol handler.

class WebViewBundleClient(
  private val owner: WebViewBundle,
) : WebViewClient() {
  override fun shouldInterceptRequest(
    view: WebView,
    request: WebResourceRequest,
  ): WebResourceResponse? =
    owner.handleRequest(request)
}

The integration package for each platform and framework handles this glue for you, so in most cases you never write intercept code yourself. See the Native section for details.