Cordova does indeed do this, and gives you access to iOS hardware APIs. This doesn't.

With this in mind, the reason I made it was for projects which don't require those things. There is no middleware here, just a very simple Xcode project with a couple of code modifications.

You can literally drop an existing web app into this and get going! :D

When I looked at Cordova it was a complete mess and pain to deal with. The docs where confusing and out of date. I just needed a simple x-code project, not a kitchen sink that was installed in the attic for some reason.

Setup:

    npm install -g cordova
    cordova create HelloWorld
    cordova platform add [ios|android|wp8|..]
    

Running:

    cordova serve # browser
    cordova emulate [ios|android|wp8|..] # emulation

This has always been pretty straightforward to me, it's a bit of an extra pain to debug iOS development on a non-OSX machine, but that's true of the parent link, too.

What's been a complete mess to deal with for you? And how long ago did you last use Cordova?

We tried to do that with our Cordova project and it wasn't this straightforward at all - we weren't even accessing the hardware. Some main points are behaviors when opening URLs, a completely unresponsive canvas, and slow rendering on the canvas.

Looking at the doc page I have no real clue I would get to what you did.

http://cordova.apache.org/docs/en/5.0.0/

Granted when I looked at the docs it was a while ago and much worse, but still it wants to teach you everything before letting you see something.

I would start at the home page, instead.

  1. http://cordova.apache.org/
  2. Click 'Download'
  3. Click the link in "[For the] npm version see the Command-Line Interface section [..]"

There's the same set of instructions listed in my comment above.

http://cordova.apache.org/docs/en/5.0.0//guide_cli_index.md....

Agreed. This just seems like a homebrewed version of Cordova lacking the ability to add plugins that provide a JS bridge to native OS features.

And without any of the maturity a project like Cordova brings to the table.