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About VodaPay Mini Programs

Mini Programs are a new technology that helps you quickly develop high-quality services and grow your business's mobile presence. It is possible to also wrap an existing mobile web application and provide all its functionalities through the use of a web view.

Mini Program Development Vs. Web Development​

The App Container is the runtime of a DSL (Domain Specific Language) Mini Program. The render engine and JS engine are independent of each other so they can run in parallel. On the other hand, in web development, they run in series as such, a computationally expensive script may cause non-responsive UI.

Web developers can use DOM APIs provided by the browser to perform DOM selection and operation. In Mini Program development, we separate UI rendering and business logic into distinct sections. While the UI layout is provided by the declarative axml language, the business layer does not include DOM manipulation and therefore, JS objects such as windows or documents are not available in the Mini Program JS layer. This design makes some DOM-dependent JS libraries, such as jQuery, unavailable. Also, the JS layer does not include Node.js runtime, so certain Node.js-specific NPM packages can not be used in the Mini Program project.

Why Use Mini Program​

An HTML5 app is sandboxed and has limitations when trying to access device native features, such as network, storage, and more. Users may wait for HTML5 resources to download for a long time because of poor network, this may cause frequent white-screen issues. Smooth transitions can not be achieved in HTML5 since there is often a delay between tapping the screen and the page switching. Finally, the unresponsive UI may hurt the user experience.

Mini Programs resolve these commons issues with the following features:

  • Faster loading.
  • More powerful capacities.
  • Almost native experience.
  • Efficient and simple development.

The Operating Environments of Mini Program​

The operating environments of Mini Program include the two major mobile OSs: iOS and Android, and the Mini Program's IDE: Mini Program Studio. These three operating environments of the Mini Program are also different in their working mechanism, as explained below. Starting with an Operating environment, logical layer, view layer

IOS

  • JavaScriptCore
    • WkWebView

Android

  • ServiceWorker
    • Chromium WebView

Mini Program Studio

  • NWJS
    • Chrome WebView