Limitations and roadmap¶

Nativella is experimental. This page lists what does not work, what is untested and what is planned, so that you find out here rather than in production.

Platforms¶

Linux¶

• No screen readers. WebKitGTK 2.52 crashes in its accessibility bridge as soon as a page loads, so Nativella disables the bridge (NO_AT_BRIDGE=1). Worth reporting upstream.
• Tray icons report no click: only their menu works.
• Menu roles are Nativella's own. GTK implements few of them, so Nativella does, on the focused page and window. See Menus.
• Global shortcuts need X11: under Wayland, expect them not to fire.
• No primary display under Wayland: Screen::primary() returns null.

One request at a time¶

• One PHP thread. Every request of every window goes through the same PHP thread, one after the other. A slow request holds back the others, and so does an open dialog. Files of public/ are served without PHP, and keep loading.
• No worker mode. The framework boots on every request, as under PHP-FPM: about 3 ms for Symfony, on top of your code.
• No background work in PHP. PHP only runs to answer a request, a native event or a timer: a timer stands in for cron. A queue worker can run as a child process, with PHP's command line on the machine.

The web layer¶

• Sessions end with the application, as in a browser, unless their cookie has an expiry date: a cookie with one is kept in the data directory. Keep what must last in the database or the settings.
• Redirects and fetch(). A fetch() that is redirected gets the right response, but response.redirected is false and response.url is the original URL.
• Redirect loops. A fetch() gives up after 20 redirects, but a page that redirects to itself keeps reloading, where a browser would stop with an error.
• Absolute URLs. PHP believes it is served from http://localhost/. The runtime rewrites such URLs in the URL attributes of HTML and the url() of CSS that PHP answers, and brings back the requests fetch(), XMLHttpRequest and EventSource send there, not more: an absolute URL in a static file of public/, or one a script uses otherwise (the src of an image), still points to where nothing listens. Prefer relative URLs there.
• Static files are read whole, by the thread that receives the request, and Range requests are not supported: fine for styles, scripts and images, not for a large video.
• Uploads are untested. $_FILES goes through the same path as any POST body, but nobody has tried it yet. File dialogs give PHP the path of a file instead.

The native side¶

• Clicking a notification reaches PHP on Linux only.
• There is no event before a window closes: closing cannot be prevented, or confirmed.
• A menu item cannot be updated on its own: set the menu again.
• Power knows the battery and the power source, not the screen lock or the thermal state, as NativePHP's PowerMonitor does.

Distribution¶

• A fixed PHP. The executable carries the PHP of the nativella command, and an Android application the one of its template, with the same extensions: those of the build. It has no php.ini.
• No installers. No .deb, .dmg or .msi, no code signing, no updates.
• No secrets. Everything in the project ships, readable by anyone who has the executable.

Roadmap¶

Next:

• Worker mode: boot the framework once, and loop over requests. ext-php-rs ships worker_request_startup() and worker_request_shutdown(); on the PHP side, it is a symfony/runtime runner, as with FrankenPHP.
• ZTS and several PHP threads, so that a slow request or a dialog does not hold back the others.
• macOS and Windows: build, test, fix.
• Extensions and php.ini: let an application pick the extensions of its PHP, to add one or to leave intl and the data of ICU out of a smaller executable, and its settings.
• Installers: bundle with tauri build.
• Mobile: more phone APIs (camera, sharing, push notifications), an iOS app tried on a device, the JIT of PCRE on Android. See Mobile.

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