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by benibela 1953 days ago
I made an app to show the books you have lend at a public library

And to make sure it can be used with all existing libraries web sites and all opacs, you can enter any url and an xpath expressions, and then it runs the xpath expressions each day and shows the result as list of books.

And since I wrote it 15 years ago, there were no tech libraries for headless browsers available. So I wrote half of my own browser, and an XPath interpreter. (Modern XPath is actually Turing-complete, and with the EXPath file module, it can read and write to any file)

So, if the store does not allow custom browsers or Python interpreters, those are two reasons it would not allow my app.
1 comments
zepto 1953 days ago
Nothing you have described would be disallowed.

Often the ideas about restrictions are simply false beliefs.

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jedberg 1953 days ago
Of course they would be. OP said they wrote their own browser. The app store specifically disallows this. You must use the Safari render engine.
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zepto 1953 days ago
> headless browsers available. So I wrote half of my own browser

The OP said - headless browser, I.e: network and parsing the Dom, but not rendering.

Perfectly allowed. Please stop saying otherwise.

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xxs 1953 days ago
Rendering engine is not the issue. It's the JIT - firefox could publish a browser, it would just need to have interpreted javascript and it'd be useless.
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benibela 1952 days ago
Well, then it is good, I did not make a JIT (only XPath AST, not even bytecode)

Although I have been thinking about making a JIT. Building on for x86 is easy enough, but then it is useless for ARM. I would not want to build two JITs. Or four with 32/64-bits.

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zepto 1952 days ago
If you needed Jit for JavaScript there is nothing on iOS stopping you from using JavascriptCore.
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FlownScepter 1953 days ago
This is just wrong. Apple disallows apps that duplicate existing functionality, i.e. browsers. You can write whatever wack headless browser you want, and there are tons of frameworks for this exact purpose, too: All manner of methods to do network things without invoking Safari.

This is a jawbreaker of hyperbole around a chewy gum center of truth.

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