Show HN: DeskGap – Like Electron, but uses the system webview
1–10 of 268 posts
Re: Show HN: DeskGap – Like Electron, but uses the system webview
#2Hi HN,
DeskGap is another try to build an lightweight alternative to Electron. Compared to the existing attempts [0, 1], I choose not to go that far and bundle a real Node.js with it[2].
And to battle test the framework, I wrapped squoosh[3] into a desktop app[4] with DeskGap, and successfully submitted it to the app stores.
[0] https://github.com/pojala/electrino
Re: Show HN: DeskGap – Like Electron, but uses the system webview
#3Hi HN, DeskGap is another try to build an lightweight alternative to Electron. Compared to the existing attempts [0, 1], I choose not to go that far and bundle a real Node.js with it[2]. And to battle test the framework, I wrapped squoosh[3] into a desktop app[4] with DeskGap, and successfully submitted it to the app stores. [0] https://github.com/pojala/electrino [1] https://github.com/jscherer92/Quark [2] https://d…
Howdy, can you compare the system-side webview with https://github.com/zserge/webview? Specifically, what control do you use on windows, MSHTML or have you incorporated the recently-freed-from-UWP (I think) Edge API?
EDIT: Appears the latter [0]. Great work. I wonder how this affects bundling...does this make it a UWP app?
0 - https://github.com/patr0nus/DeskGap/blob/master/core/src/win...
Re: Show HN: DeskGap – Like Electron, but uses the system webview
#4Hi HN, DeskGap is another try to build an lightweight alternative to Electron. Compared to the existing attempts [0, 1], I choose not to go that far and bundle a real Node.js with it[2]. And to battle test the framework, I wrapped squoosh[3] into a desktop app[4] with DeskGap, and successfully submitted it to the app stores. [0] https://github.com/pojala/electrino [1] https://github.com/jscherer92/Quark [2] https://d…
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Re: Show HN: DeskGap – Like Electron, but uses the system webview
#5These projects completely overlook _why_ people choose Electron over the system view.
- Nobody wants to be testing against multiple browser/rendering engines in 2019.
- Nobody wants to wait for a vendor to update their implementation when Chrome has the feature available almost immediately.
Edit: Since I can already see the litany of armchair-quarterback-desktop-app-authors, I'm just going to link to the comment from the guy who actually migrated Slack away from WKWebView.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18763449
Blows my mind we're still debating this.
Re: Show HN: DeskGap – Like Electron, but uses the system webview
#6These projects completely overlook _why_ people choose Electron over the system view. - Nobody wants to be testing against multiple browser/rendering engines in 2019. - Nobody wants to wait for a vendor to update their implementation when Chrome has the feature available almost immediately. Edit: Since I can already see the litany of armchair-quarterback-desktop-app-authors, I'm just going to link to the comment from…
> Nobody wants to be testing against multiple browser/rendering engines in 2019.
That's certainly _one_ reason why.
I would posit that the main reason is that web developers would like to reuse their webapp skillset for building desktop apps. This seems like it accomplishes the goal.
Re: testing against multiple browsers, frankly this is _mostly_ a solved problem. The big gaps between rendering engines is on the real fringe of css at this point, which most of us aren't bothering to use. Also, many people builting on top of electron (and presumably this platform) are using css toolkits like blueprint, and most of those take care of most of your cross browser issues anyway. So, largely not a concern.
Re: Show HN: DeskGap – Like Electron, but uses the system webview
#7These projects completely overlook _why_ people choose Electron over the system view. - Nobody wants to be testing against multiple browser/rendering engines in 2019. - Nobody wants to wait for a vendor to update their implementation when Chrome has the feature available almost immediately. Edit: Since I can already see the litany of armchair-quarterback-desktop-app-authors, I'm just going to link to the comment from…
> Nobody wants to be testing against multiple browser/rendering engines in 2019. That's certainly _one_ reason why. I would posit that the main reason is that web developers would like to reuse their webapp skillset for building desktop apps. This seems like it accomplishes the goal. Re: testing against multiple browsers, frankly this is _mostly_ a solved problem. The big gaps between rendering engines is on the real…
It is not a mostly solved problem.
The people behind Slack, Spotify, and so on have actually commented on these threads explaining the exact line of reasoning. This stuff isn't limited to just CSS, and it makes total business sense to avoid it.
Re: Show HN: DeskGap – Like Electron, but uses the system webview
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Nobody wants to be testing against multiple browser/rendering engines in 2019. That's certainly _one_ reason why. I would posit that the main reason is that web developers would like to reuse their webapp skillset for building desktop apps. This seems like it accomplishes the goal. Re: testing against multiple browsers, frankly this is _mostly_ a solved problem. The big gaps between rendering engines is on the real…
It is not a mostly solved problem. The people behind Slack, Spotify, and so on have actually commented on these threads explaining the exact line of reasoning. This stuff isn't limited to just CSS, and it makes total business sense to avoid it.
Maybe I'm just spoiled having doing web dev back in the netscape 4 era when things were _really_ bad. These days it seems like a reset stylesheet and a couple polyfills and you're good to go. I don't doubt that certain problem spaces still run into major cross browser issues, but I guess I've been lucky enough to avoid those problems for the last couple of years.
Re: Show HN: DeskGap – Like Electron, but uses the system webview
#9Hi HN, DeskGap is another try to build an lightweight alternative to Electron. Compared to the existing attempts [0, 1], I choose not to go that far and bundle a real Node.js with it[2]. And to battle test the framework, I wrapped squoosh[3] into a desktop app[4] with DeskGap, and successfully submitted it to the app stores. [0] https://github.com/pojala/electrino [1] https://github.com/jscherer92/Quark [2] https://d…
How is Deskgap lightweighter than Electron if, at the end of the day, it's using the browser on my OS (which, let's assume, is Chrome)?
Re: Show HN: DeskGap – Like Electron, but uses the system webview
#10These projects completely overlook _why_ people choose Electron over the system view. - Nobody wants to be testing against multiple browser/rendering engines in 2019. - Nobody wants to wait for a vendor to update their implementation when Chrome has the feature available almost immediately. Edit: Since I can already see the litany of armchair-quarterback-desktop-app-authors, I'm just going to link to the comment from…
> Nobody wants to be testing against multiple browser/rendering engines in 2019.
That's why DeskGap uses EdgeHTML on Windows. With toolchains such as webpack and babel, building an app that runs on WebKit and EdgeHTML (which is going to be replaced by Chromium[0]) can't be that hard.
> Nobody wants to wait for a vendor to update their implementation when Chrome has the feature available almost immediately.
DeskGap doesn't mean to be a complete replacement for Electron. But after a glance of Electron Apps[1], I suppose many simple apps do not require start-of-art features.
[0] https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2018/12/06/micro...