Developer Quick Start

Introduction

HakuNeko S currently consists of two parts:

1. The main web-application hosted in the cloud
2. A desktop client running the web application

Both parts require nodejs and npm to be installed.

Web-Application

The web-application is the heart of HakuNeko S and is written in Javascript using the polymer framework. The source files are located in the web sub-directory. It is recommend to install the polymer-cli npm package to host the web-application locally or compress the source. To host the web-application, open a terminal, change to the web sub-directory and run polymer serve. This will start a web-server hosting the web-application on http://localhost:8081.

Why HakuNeko became a hosted web-application?

• Manga websites are changing more frequently, the web-application can be updated and no new version needs to be downloaded and installed on the user's client
• Manga website security improvements are heavily based on Javascript, the web-application can easily understand Javascript
• Downloads with the previous version of HakuNeko were unstable, the web-application uses technology tailored for the web
• Development of connector plugins can now be done with just plain Javascript and might attract more contributers
• Minor UI changes are simpler to implement

Desktop Client

Running the web-application in a browser only offers very limited interaction capabilities (no local file access) with the user's machine. HakuNeko offers a desktop client based on electron. The desktop client is like a tailored browser, but allows the web-application access to the file system. To develop and run the electron client, the electron npm package should be installed. To run the electron desktop client, open a terminal, change to the electron sub-directory and run electron ./src. The desktop client will now run the web-application hosted on http://localhost:8081. The F12 key allows to open and close the developer console as in the generic chromium browser. After making changes to the source code of the web-application, press the F5 key (while the developer console is active) to reload the web-page.