conveyor VS vstwebview

Interesting timing! We're just in the middle of adding Python support to Hydraulic Conveyor, which is a similar tool [1]. There's a github issue [2] and mailing list that'll get notified when it's done. Disclosure: it's commercial but free for open source projects.

There are many of these open source packagers and they all share very similar problems:

1. They don't let you do software updates, even though software updates are practically mandatory for any real project. Electron is a stand-out here because it does address this, but their update engines are unmaintained for years and have some major unfixed problems (causes a lot of issues with Windows networks, for example).

2. Even in the very rare cases that they do, they don't let you force updates on launch even though many apps need something like this to keep up with protocol changes. It's one of the reasons people like web apps.

3. They don't help you with signing, usually being just thin wrappers around the native tooling. For example they don't simplify key management, they don't support cloud signing (essential since May because Microsoft now insist on HSMs for all keys, not just EV keys), they don't do notarization, they don't generate CSRs for you.

4. They require the use of CI to cross-build even when apps are written in portable frameworks that don't require compilation. This is because they are just thin wrappers around the native tooling.

5. They're invariably language specific even though there's no good reason to be because 80% of the work is the same regardless of what language or framework you use.

It's possible to bite the bullet, chew glass for a while and solve all these problems, which is what we did for Electron/JVM/Flutter/native apps. You can reimplement all the native tooling so users can cross-build (i.e. make Mac packages from Linux/Windows, Windows packages from Mac/Linux etc), which enables releasing from developer laptops or cheap Linux CI workers. You can support software update by integrating Sparkle on macOS, apt on Debian/Ubuntu and by using MSIX on Windows (and by then working around all the bugs in Windows to make it work well). You can generate download pages that work out the user's OS and gives them the right download, and instructions for how to install self-signed apps if the developer isn't code signing with a recognized certificate. You can abstract platform neutral things and expose platform specific things. Then you can write a parallel incremental build system so doing all the work is as fast as possible, and write lots of code to detect all the myriad mistakes people make and give good error messages or auto-fix them. Then you can make it support GitHub Releases. Then you can document it all.

But that big pile of glass isn't particularly tasty, which is why open source projects don't do it and we ask commercial users to pay for it.

Briefcase looks nice but it also seems to have all the problems listed above. I think once we add Python support Conveyor will be quite useful for the Python community, especially if we can find a workaround for pip not support cross-building of venvs. It would be great if you could just whip up a quick Python script, run one command and your installed clients start automatically updating, your download page updates, and the whole thing is no harder than releasing a static markdown-rendered website.

[1] https://hydraulic.dev/

[2] https://github.com/hydraulic-software/conveyor/issues/73

Haha, it's amusing that the history essays are one of the things you remember :)

Yes you can compile Scala and ScalaFX apps down to native binaries this way. Look at Gluon Substrate:

https://github.com/gluonhq/substrate

One of our customers is experimenting with shipping such apps with Conveyor. There's a discussion ongoing here:

https://github.com/hydraulic-software/conveyor/discussions/6...

We got a console hello world working, albeit the DX is a bit rough. You need some ugly config boilerplate and some additional Native Image json files. But, it works, at least enough to create a Mac package with the regular Conveyor feature set. There are some limits though. I think the WebView doesn't work when the app is natively compiled this way.

If it all starts working well it could be quite interesting for desktop app development, as suddenly you could use high level languages and portable UI toolkits but with the sort of startup time, performance and memory usage you'd expect from native apps (modulo binary size which is still quite large). If you want to use HTML as the UI then you can use the Chromium Embedding Framework, which would give you an Electron-like experience but with many more available languages:

https://hydraulic.dev/blog/13-deploying-apps-with-jcef.html

I've been using JVM GUI for years for various tasks. It was appropriate for Bitcoin tasks because it's immune to injection attacks, because you can run everything locally with P2P protocols like the original Bitcoin app did, it's portable etc. Also I learned GUI programming decades ago and find classical UI toolkit concepts like VBox, HBox, StackPane, TableView etc more intuitive than HTML.

I tried this same approach (embedded webview instead of e.g. electron -- https://github.com/rdaum/vstwebview) for something last year and I agree the biggest problem is Linux support, specifically WebKit GTK.

On Windows, and to a lesser degree on the Mac, this approach actually went pretty smoothly. But WebKit GTK introduces all sorts of problems -- having to tie into GTK's event loop even though you don't want it, dealing with distribution variances, event binding issues, etc.

I suspect the answer here for Tauri is that someone needs to expend the effort to come up with a good Rust crate bundling of Chromium or Gecko or etc that isn't tied into GTK. Yes, it would defeat the "just use the platform's webview instead of bundling" line, but really it would only be a concern for Linux.

I spent some time last year building out a UI framework for VSTs based on embedded HTML, after being frustrated with the terrible VST GUI package from Steinberg. I think it showed promise, but I'm unable to continue to make progress with it:

https://github.com/rdaum/vstwebview

It'd be great if somebody were to run with it. I feel I made good initial progress. These days, I have to concentrate on my paying work (in Rust, not C++) instead.

So I went looking for alternatives. Embedding something like QT ends up with a bunch of issues involving the threading model and so on. Others have tried and failed.

There's stuff like JUCE but it's not just a UI framework but a whole toolkit with its own world view and licensing etc.

Then I got thinking about how -- as much as I kind of hate it -- the web is really the standard for cross platform UIs. These days it's pretty fast even on fairly low end devices. Lots of toolkit options. Canvas support. Multiple languages. Decent security model. And both Windows and Mac come with embeddable webview components (Edge and Webkit).

So I threw together:

https://github.com/rdaum/vstwebview/blob/main/README.md

Still a bit rough around the edges and somewhat untested, but would love contributions.