Ultralight VS tauri

[2] https://ultralig.ht/

Web rendering would be Blink, with V8 being the JavaScript engine. I believe they have their own UI rendering process.

I know of another company that does something similar for the UI process, but with WebKit instead as the base:

https://github.com/ultralight-ux/ultralight#rocket-dual-high...

What I'd really like to see with CEF et al, is JS being dropped, in favor of directly controlling the DOM from the host language. Then we could, for example, write a Rust (or Kotlin, Zig, Haskell, etc) desktop application that simply directly manipulated the DOM, and had it rendered by a HTML+CSS layout engine. Folks could then write a React-like framework for that language (to help render & re-render the DOM in an elegant way).

Ultralight (https://ultralig.ht/) looks pretty cool. I think another possible option is Servo (https://github.com/servo/servo) – it was abandoned by Mozilla along with Rust during their layoffs a while back (but the project still seems to have a decent bit of activity). It would be great if some group of devs could revive the project, or a company could fund such a revival.

Eventually, we'll need to reflect on, and explore whether HTML+CSS is really the best way to do layout, and we could maybe perhaps consider proting the Android/iOS layout approach over to desktop.

I'm curious if the project will be open-source or do you have plans to go the Awesomium/Ultralight route with both open/closed sources and volume licenses? Or do you plan to offer commercial support services like other open source software?

I’m not tied to any language, but it needs to be able to wrap a c++ library. I started with .NET 7 MAUI - no linux support & very mobile focused. Tried out Electron. Wins on ease and usability, but has massive overhead. (Basic “Hello world” executable compiled to over 200mb) I then discovered Ultralight (https://ultralig.ht/). Big win on size, but was last updated 3 years ago.

tauri exists or if you wanted to ultralig.ht

I agree web stuff is really the best way to develop UIs. Good luck making responsive stuff in C++ for example. The paradigm of HTML, CSS, and JS is extremely powerful and even allows you to use canvas, webgpu, wasm.

There are multiple commercial projects that use web dev paradigm for GUIs:

https://coherent-labs.com/

https://ultralig.ht/

https://sciter.com/

Nice review, thanks! There are also: Ultralight (based on Webkit), LiteHTML, Tkhtml3 and Lobo Evolution. See also timeline of web engines.

Hi, dear Tauri! Long time no see. I published my first post, Developing a Desktop Application via Rust and NextJS. The Tauri Way almost a year ago. Since then, Tauri has become stronger. I'm happy about that! And now, I am very pleased to make a useful contribution to the Tauri community. As a full-stack developer, I frequently face situations where I need to start a DB-based UI project as fast as possible. It's stressful if I need to start the project from 100% scratch. I prefer to keep some boilerplates on hand, which will save me time and nerves and will be the subject of this article.

Hey Thanks!

Just electron & vite. I might actually migrate off electron, Tauri (https://tauri.app/) seems to be getting more stable and it's gotten great reviews.

I think this is the boilerplate I used though https://github.com/cawa-93/vite-electron-builder.

Well the great thing about WebAssembly is that you can port QT or anything else to be at a layer below -- thanks to WebAssembly Interface Types[0] and the Component Model specification that works underneath that.

To over-simplify, the Component Model manages language interop, and WIT constrains the boundaries with interfaces.

IMO the problem here is defining a 90% solution for most window, tab, button, etc management, then building embeddings in QT, Flutter/Skia, and other lower level engines. Getting a good cross-platform way of doing data passing, triggering re-renders, serializing window state is probably the meat of the interesting work.

On top of that, you really need great UX. This is normally where projects fall short -- why should I use this solution instead of something like Tauri[2] which is excellent or Electron?

[0]: https://github.com/WebAssembly/component-model/blob/main/des...

[1]: https://github.com/WebAssembly/component-model/blob/main/des...

[2]: https://tauri.app/

Welcome to the 2nd episode of our series “Building with Tauri”, where we chat with developers who build amazing projects and products using Tauri.

Tauri seemed like the "thing" I should switch to because everybody loves Rust (heh), and because it ships significantly smaller apps.

First of all, I will be using npm as my package manager but feel free to use whatever you prefer. Find more info here.

Today I'm talking about Tauri! Do you know all the various tools that allow you to develop native applications starting from web languages? They often need an intermediate compilation, in the middle of which you end up encountering various problems not always transparent and directly solvable with a language mostly detached from native development. On the other hand, there's still the ease of developing attractive and easily usable interfaces, which are more difficult to develop with low level languages.

I think Tauri is the most established framework using that approach

https://tauri.app