graderjs
sciter
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graderjs | sciter | |
---|---|---|
10 | 84 | |
155 | 2,563 | |
1.3% | 0.2% | |
0.0 | 0.0 | |
over 1 year ago | 11 months ago | |
Shell | C++ | |
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later | - |
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
graderjs
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Use any web browser as GUI, with Zig in the back end and HTML5 in the front end
This is very polished and cool looking. Inspiring. I find this project's level of polish very inspiring.
It's lovely to see someone has captured this idea and expressed it in the right way to make it interesting to many people. I really hope this mode of desktop apps can take off, at least to the level where the community has something to explore for a while to see if it works. I made something like this for Chrome browsers a while ago, nodejs backends, vanilla front-ends, built-in packaging using pkg. It's just a nice approach: https://github.com/dosyago/graderjs
And I made a demo using the venerable MS Paint clone JS Paint^0. The dev experience was great, I literally just dropped in the front-end code to the right folder, compiled it and wham, "desktop JS paint" on 3 platforms, haha.
Using the ubiquitous local browser as the rendering / API engine for desktop just seems smart. And it's technically interesting, because you get to think in terms of how can you step back from the browser, the platform, the front-end and the back-end and come up with a general API that addresses all of it, which is kinda cool.
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Ask HN: What is your preferred light weight stack for personal projects?
Client / Server Web App: Node.JS, Bang.html[0], the filesystem
Native downloadable executable desktop GUI application: Node.JS, GraderJS
CLI app: ??? Don't know yet, GraderJS can work but it's focused around GUI
Mobile app: ??? Don't know yet
Embedded: ??? Don't know yet
Graphics: Processing (but surely there are much better options nowadays)
AI: ??? Don't know yet
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Ask HN: Why aren't there any real alternatives to Electron?
I'm working on an alternative. It's a slightly different take, but provides similar functionality of Node.js plus front end code in a packaged binary. Instead of using a weird custom fork of chrome and downloading that for every different binary we just use the system Chrome browser (or install it once for all apps). Eventually we can probably expand to use other Chrome browsers or even other web driver supported browsers which Firefox seems to be building that support out. I just like the idea of using something that's already on the system.
Take a look at the wonderful GraderJS, heh :)
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Jspaint.exe: JavaScript Paint –~ as a cross-platform native desktop app
For those who didn't reach the end of the README.md, it seems to use an electron-alternative called grader, from the same author:
https://github.com/i5ik/graderjs
It runs server and downloads Chrome (if not available already) and starts it in app mode.
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Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust
It is a good idea but it is not a new idea
the interesting history of these sorts of frameworks is that Google actually created a framework that did this and stopped development on it. the code is still on GitHub. And there's a bunch of other frameworks that use a variety of different languages not just rust as the application language that also have this idea of not bundling chromium but instead using the system webview for rendering HTML and JavaScript.
You can find a bunch of different approaches in lists like "alternatives to electron." There's some on GitHub.
I took a slightly different approach where instead of using the system web view which I thought you know is going to be inconsistent across systems and it's not going to support the latest HTML JavaScript and security features I used the assumption that the user already has chrome installed which works in a high number of cases or can download and install it if that's not the case. predictably I suppose some people express to satisfaction that it was not using Firefox. using Firefox becomes more possible and more likely I suppose as firefox's support for the dev tools protocol achieves parity with chrome support for that.
sciter
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Show HN: Dropflow, a CSS layout engine for node or <canvas>
> wondering if css and svg could be used as abstraction over graphics and UI libraries
There's another project called Sciter that uses CSS to target native graphics libraries: https://sciter.com
> I wonder how hard it was to implement css. I've heard it can be pretty complex.
It was hard, but the biggest barrier is the obscurity of the knowledge.
Text layout is the hardest, because working with glyphs and iterating them in reverse for RTL is brain-breaking. And line wrapping gets really complicated. It's also the most obscure because nobody has written down everything you need to know in one place. After I finished block layout early on, I had to stop for a couple of years (only working a few hours a week though) and learn all of the ins, outs, dos, and don'ts around shaping and itemizing text. A lot of that I learned by reading Pango's [1] source code, and a lot I pieced together from Google searches.
But other than that, the W3C specifications cover almost everything. The CSS2 standard [2] is one of the most beautiful things I've ever read. It's internally consistent, concise, and obviously the result of years of deliberation, trial and error. (CSS3 is great, but CSS2 is the bedrock for everything).
- Ask HN: Fastest cross-platform GUI stack/strategy
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Immediate Mode GUI Programming
otherwise, if we have only retained mode as in browsers, we will need to modify the DOM heavily and create temporary elements for handles.
- This year in Servo: over 1000 pull requests and beyond
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Rusty revenant Servo returns to render once more
I've still never used it but I've long been curious about Sciter:
- Ode to the M1
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So you want to write a GUI framework (2021)
These bullet points are exactly what I did in Sciter (https://sciter.com)
- Windowing
-- Tabs
-- Menus
-- Painting
-- Animation
-- Text
-The compositor
-Handling input
-- Pointer input
-- Keyboard input
- Accessibility
- Internationalization and localization
- Cross-platform APIs
- The web view
- Native look and feel
On top of that DOM and CSS implementations to achieve declarative UI. And JS as a languuage behind UI - declarative in some sense way of defining UI behavior.
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Servo, the parallel browser engine written in Rust
I'm not sure if it can support all the libraries but yes it can be used to make desktop apps. Theres also Sciter.
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Digital Audio Workstation Front End Development Struggles
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:
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RePalm
I did UI part of it.
Up until last year my Sciter ( https://sciter.com ) worked on WinCE.
Dropped support after my last customer that was using WinCE decided to drop support of that OS.
WinCE had pretty solid and stable core runtime and API. Graphics was limited by GDI (no antialiasing and alpha channel) but that was the only major problem.
What are some alternatives?
webview - Tiny cross-platform webview library for C/C++. Uses WebKit (GTK/Cocoa) and Edge WebView2 (Windows).
qt - Qt binding for Go (Golang) with support for Windows / macOS / Linux / FreeBSD / Android / iOS / Sailfish OS / Raspberry Pi / AsteroidOS / Ubuntu Touch / JavaScript / WebAssembly
tauri - Build smaller, faster, and more secure desktop applications with a web frontend.
flexboard - React component library for re-sizable sidebars
RmlUi - RmlUi - The HTML/CSS User Interface library evolved
NanoGUI - Minimalistic GUI library for OpenGL
imgui - Dear ImGui: Bloat-free Graphical User interface for C++ with minimal dependencies
Wails - Create beautiful applications using Go
libRocket - libRocket - The HTML/CSS User Interface library
fyne - Cross platform GUI toolkit in Go inspired by Material Design
go-astilectron - Build cross platform GUI apps with GO and HTML/JS/CSS (powered by Electron)
ui - Platform-native GUI library for Go.