graderjs VS wry

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.

0: https://github.com/00000o1/jspaint.exe

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

[0]: https://github.com/crisdosyago/bang.html/

[1]: https://github.com/crisdosyago/graderjs/

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 :)

https://github.com/crisdosyago/graderjs

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.

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.

https://github.com/c9fe/graderjs

The biggest benefits we derived from Tauri were Wry and the sidecar mechanism. Wry (the second half of Tauri: tao/wry) is a cross-platform WebView rendering library in Rust that supports all major desktop platforms like Windows, macOS, and Linux. It essentially spins up a native web view from whatever operating system it’s running on and doesn’t require an application to bundle one with it. Wry greatly reduces the overhead of “pushing” a browser to our users, instead leaning on the host OS to handle rendering a web view. This made our applications really lean.

Check out https://tauri.app/ - specifically, https://github.com/tauri-apps/wry, which provides a cross-platform interface to the system's WebView.

Tauri uses WebkitGTK, which has pretty bad performance compared to other browsers on the same hardware.

https://github.com/tauri-apps/wry/issues/890#issuecomment-14...

One small note regarding Native Webview meant above. You can find ultimate information on this topic here. In a nutshell, Tauri applications use as HTML renderer Webkit (safari engine) on MacOS, Microsoft Edge WebView2 on Windows, and WebKitGTK on Linux (port of Webkit for Linux). Pay attention to the fact that a Tauri application could behave differently on different platforms according to the information above.

wry looks like a better choice, but no one has bothered to work on this task, yet.

I think this might be somewhat close to what you're looking for: https://github.com/tauri-apps/wry

They're wrapping the Android webkit/webview stuff in wry and creating an activity for it. I imagine they've already achieved or are close to achieving full parity API-wise to proper Tauri desktop apps.

Another way to approach it is to wrap the web app in a webview and use Tauri for custom logic, see https://github.com/tauri-apps/wry. You'd need to teach yourself some Rust though. I'm sure you could achieve something similar with Express. The performance will be similar to using a browser so not terrible.

It uses the WebView that the underlying OS provides to render the application’s UI — this is one of the reasons why the application binaries are smaller (as compared to electron). The WRY library from the Tauri toolkit provides a unified interface to interact with WebViews provided by different operating systems. The WRY library uses the Tao crate for cross-platform window management.