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web-to-desktop-framework-comparison
This repository was made to create an objective comparison of multiple framework that grant us to "transform" our web app to desktop application formats.
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WorkOS
The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.
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agenda
:construction: :calendar: Offline-ready roadmap and task management planning tool (by cookiengineer)
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webview
Tiny cross-platform webview library for C/C++. Uses WebKit (GTK/Cocoa) and Edge WebView2 (Windows).
I looked into some alternatives a while back [1] and thought Neutralino looked promising except that it doesn't support node modules. I.e. you cannot use the existing ecosystem of node-stuff.
Still, glad there are many options for using web UI to create desktop apps these days.
[1]: Neutralino themselves link to this nice comparison table: https://github.com/Elanis/web-to-desktop-framework-compariso...
I looked into some alternatives a while back [1] and thought Neutralino looked promising except that it doesn't support node modules. I.e. you cannot use the existing ecosystem of node-stuff.
Still, glad there are many options for using web UI to create desktop apps these days.
[1]: Neutralino themselves link to this nice comparison table: https://github.com/Elanis/web-to-desktop-framework-compariso...
Last year I built a very simple task management tool for myself, where I am building the binary like this [1].
In retrospect I would probably go with an extra "cmds" folder to have multiple build variants, but it is easy to follow the code like it is built right now.
[1] https://github.com/cookiengineer/agenda
https://github.com/neutralinojs/evaluation
8MB vs 42MB for electron. That's pretty real savings IMO!
It's also using the existing shared libraries on your system, so there's a very real chance a lot of this 8MB might be ready resident & take zero additional space. It'd be great to see what the memory impact of launching a second & different app would be!
Personally I think the Electron hate is because people think every Electron app behaves as badly as Slack. Honestly 42MB is not that bad. But it hurts my soul that each app has it's own static copy of the browser, means there is zero chance for sharing. If you are running 2-3 apps it's fine but I want a world where we can potentially have dozens or even a hundred little gui apps running & it works fine, no problem. That would be on par with native apps & this is a clear demonstration of one way we could get there.
The missing next step is that this system launches a mini http/websocket server to run. It'd be interesting to explore using a lightweight Sandboxing multi vm to host apps on, might make the server side lighter weight too. Wasm, or cloudflare's workerd... The CRI folk have been busy building support for managing work let like things like this, & desktop could definitely pull some wins, now that folks like Neutralinojs and Tauri are starting to do better at desktop webapps.
Golang can compile to windows statically, and on Windows those bindings are using the MSWebView2 API (aka Microsoft Edge webview).
I know that you can also compile the webview.cc into a dll specifically, and link against that. But I'd never done with Visual C++ because I am cross-compiling from Linux to Windows.
The README of the webview/webview project refers to the WebView2 SDK on NuGet, however [1]
[1] https://github.com/webview/webview#windows-preparation