Building a Desktop Application for Datasette

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • datastation

    App to easily query, script, and visualize data from every database, file, and API.

  • > Sure, Electron is theoretically cross-platform. But you are going to need a lot of platform-specific code to package the app for macOS, Windows, or Linux anyway.

    Not really. The most platform-specific code I've got in my app is 1) the CI install instructions that use brew rather than apt-get [0] and 2) what exists in the application menu [1].

    [0] https://github.com/multiprocessio/datastation/blob/master/.g...

    [1] https://github.com/multiprocessio/datastation/blob/master/de...

  • gecko-dev

    Read-only Git mirror of the Mercurial gecko repositories at https://hg.mozilla.org. How to contribute: https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/contributing/contribution_quickref.html

  • XUL was replaced by HTML and CSS - the UI for modern Firefox used to be XUL, now it's HTML (actually XHTML, I guess they couldn't quite kick the XML part of it): https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/blob/master/browser/bas...

  • 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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  • positron

    Discontinued a experimental, Electron-compatible runtime on top of Gecko

  • I assume they meant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XULRunner, which was Mozilla's spiritual predecessor to Electron.

    Some abandoned modern alternatives included Positron[1][2] and qbrt[3][4].

    While technically possible using Firefox's XULRunner functionality (`firefox --app app.ini` — mostly undocumented, potentially unsupported in the future), as far as I can tell, Mozilla has abandoned the Electron approach for XUL/Gecko bundling, which is a shame since Firefox itself is basically just an implementation on top of the Gecko XUL runtime.

    > "[Firefox] is distributed as the combination of a Gecko XUL runtime — libxul, other shared libraries, and non-browser-specific resources like those in toolkit/ — plus a Firefox XUL application — mostly just the files in Contents/Resources/browser/, plus the 'firefox' stub executable that loads Gecko and points it at a XUL application" [5]

    [1]: https://github.com/mozilla/positron

    [2]: http://web.archive.org/web/20210227132731/https://mykzilla.o...

    [3]: https://github.com/mozilla/qbrt

    [4]: http://web.archive.org/web/20210601133844/https://mykzilla.o...

    [5]: https://mykzilla.org/2017/03/08/positron-discontinued/#comme...

  • qbrt

    CLI to a Gecko desktop app runtime

  • I assume they meant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XULRunner, which was Mozilla's spiritual predecessor to Electron.

    Some abandoned modern alternatives included Positron[1][2] and qbrt[3][4].

    While technically possible using Firefox's XULRunner functionality (`firefox --app app.ini` — mostly undocumented, potentially unsupported in the future), as far as I can tell, Mozilla has abandoned the Electron approach for XUL/Gecko bundling, which is a shame since Firefox itself is basically just an implementation on top of the Gecko XUL runtime.

    > "[Firefox] is distributed as the combination of a Gecko XUL runtime — libxul, other shared libraries, and non-browser-specific resources like those in toolkit/ — plus a Firefox XUL application — mostly just the files in Contents/Resources/browser/, plus the 'firefox' stub executable that loads Gecko and points it at a XUL application" [5]

    [1]: https://github.com/mozilla/positron

    [2]: http://web.archive.org/web/20210227132731/https://mykzilla.o...

    [3]: https://github.com/mozilla/qbrt

    [4]: http://web.archive.org/web/20210601133844/https://mykzilla.o...

    [5]: https://mykzilla.org/2017/03/08/positron-discontinued/#comme...

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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