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ElectronJS alternative: SciterJS – HTML/CSS/JS in 4.5 MB executable

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Re: ElectronJS alternative: SciterJS – HTML/CSS/JS in 4.5 MB executable

#121

Post by DethNinja »

c-smile wrote: post #114
mysterydip wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first thought would be patreon or another of those services where people can sponsor monthly.

How realistic is the patreon schema? Say you would need to support 2-3 members team of highly professional software developers... Is patreon realistic for that?

Imho Patreon is not suitable for your case.

Both Patreon and Kickstarter is oriented towards consumer goods but Sciter is a B2B product. Software-wise people use Kickstarter and Patreon for consumer goods like games where you need literally thousands of fans to be profitable.

Sciter is a really good quality software and I believe it can overtake QT in future, but I got a feeling you might want to go with VC funding and possibly change the business model.

Re: ElectronJS alternative: SciterJS – HTML/CSS/JS in 4.5 MB executable

#122

Post by jakear »

k__ wrote: post #117

What do you think is the main reason these alternatives never caught on? Everyone hates on Electron and there are a bunch of commercial and free alternatives, but somehow nobody really cares.

"Everyone hates on Electron" = a very vocal minority of HN folk don't like that Electron apps tend to be higher in memory consumption and executable size, but the majority of users don't really care about either of those. Same for the majority of project leads.

What users care about is "does this thing do what I need it to do on my OS in a relatively timely manner with not too many bugs and not too steep a learning curve?". What project leads care about is "is this tech well supported, cross-patform, and battle-tested, and will it be easy to hire for?".

Using established frameworks that are profit centers for enterprise-scale companies (MSFT/Google) ensures support will always be around, and the largest cross-platform bugs have already been encountered then fixed/documented. Using normal web-tech means performance will be acceptable (people have a good feel for how long things take in web), and hiring/on-boarding will be easy (we routinely have folks with only basic web dev experience building vscode and contributing fixes within a matter of hours of encountering the code for the first time).

I challenge you to try to mentally-argue one of these alternatives to a superior... I think you'll find that you don't have much to say but "look a the memory consumption! look at the download size!", but I'd be interested to be proven wrong.

Re: ElectronJS alternative: SciterJS – HTML/CSS/JS in 4.5 MB executable

#123

Post by Etzos »

NetOpWibby wrote: post #16
ptrott2017 wrote: post #14

Sciter is a very nice engine with a solid API/SDK and rock solid engineering behind it. For developers building efficient UI apps it can be a real alternative method to things like electron or as a lighter alternative to QT with QML script. However until now it was only available under commercial licence. Andrew Fedoniouk ( a.k.a. c-smile Sciter's original developer) has a kickstarter to fund open sourcing and suppor…

55 hours to go and not even a third of the goal completed. I’m an optimistic guy but I don’t see this happening. EDIT: I wouldn’t mind being wrong.

It's really sad because this is the first time I heard about this campaign. Had I known earlier I would have pledged sooner and spread the word around.

Re: ElectronJS alternative: SciterJS – HTML/CSS/JS in 4.5 MB executable

#124

Post by c-smile »

DethNinja wrote: post #121
c-smile wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How realistic is the patreon schema? Say you would need to support 2-3 members team of highly professional software developers... Is patreon realistic for that?

Imho Patreon is not suitable for your case. Both Patreon and Kickstarter is oriented towards consumer goods but Sciter is a B2B product. Software-wise people use Kickstarter and Patreon for consumer goods like games where you need literally thousands of fans to be profitable. Sciter is a really good quality software and I believe it can overtake QT in future, but I got a feeling you might want to go with VC funding a…

"VC funding and possibly change the business model"

I was thinking about something like that. But again, realistically speaking, what would be interesting for VCs in such project to even bother about it?

Re: ElectronJS alternative: SciterJS – HTML/CSS/JS in 4.5 MB executable

#125

Post by edem »

imtringued wrote: post #46
edem wrote: post #24

What prevents me from even looking at this link is the 4.5MB executable. Come on. Have you tried to download that amount of data using a spotty mobile connection?

Electron is much bigger than 4.5MB.

I'm not using Electron either.

Re: ElectronJS alternative: SciterJS – HTML/CSS/JS in 4.5 MB executable

#126

Post by edem »

franga2000 wrote: post #64
edem wrote: post #24

What prevents me from even looking at this link is the 4.5MB executable. Come on. Have you tried to download that amount of data using a spotty mobile connection?

How about 50MB? (the current smallest possible binary using Electron)

I'm not using Electron either.

Re: ElectronJS alternative: SciterJS – HTML/CSS/JS in 4.5 MB executable

#128

Post by amadeuspagel »

c-smile wrote: post #110

Sciter's author here. What would be strategies in case of Kickstarter campaign will fail? In principle I can publish it for free as it is now but I definitely don't want it to be one more of abandon-ware projects that are open sourcing as the end of life. In general OS development is significantly more costly (for the author) as closed source one - for many reasons. So OS development needs steady stream of funding. S…

An app store? A service that automatically takes your site and turns it into a SciterJS app?

Re: ElectronJS alternative: SciterJS – HTML/CSS/JS in 4.5 MB executable

#129

Post by jeremyjh »

Klonoar wrote: post #63
edko wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on the application. I did a couple of projects with Rust's web-view crate (which uses native Safari on MacOS, and native Edge on Windows). This gave me access to the full JS and the full Rust ecosystem. I think the possibilities were richer than if I had used Electron alone. For example, I was able to use the Tantivy crate, for very fast and powerful full-text search. All of this with a fraction of the exe…

I mean, no: you can do the same stuff with Electron, and you _won't_ be saddled with the issues inherent to WKWebView that Apple still hasn't fixed years later. There are also web features that Safari notoriously does not implement that you'd have access to in Edge. Webview2 on Windows is also going through a weird period where you can't rely on it "just working" without the end user installing a runtime. There is a…

I don't know why you are being downvoted. Personally I consider Electron to be cancer but this comment is very informative and raises some very valid points. For some reason it is 2020 and there is no fully qualified solution for cross platform desktop application development. Every option has massive downsides, gotchas, rough edges and limitations.

Re: ElectronJS alternative: SciterJS – HTML/CSS/JS in 4.5 MB executable

#130

Post by DethNinja »

c-smile wrote: post #124
DethNinja wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imho Patreon is not suitable for your case. Both Patreon and Kickstarter is oriented towards consumer goods but Sciter is a B2B product. Software-wise people use Kickstarter and Patreon for consumer goods like games where you need literally thousands of fans to be profitable. Sciter is a really good quality software and I believe it can overtake QT in future, but I got a feeling you might want to go with VC funding a…

"VC funding and possibly change the business model" I was thinking about something like that. But again, realistically speaking, what would be interesting for VCs in such project to even bother about it?

I honestly don't know your business so I can't personally say it but in essence:

Do you think market(consumers) for GUI design software will increase or decrease in future? I do believe it will increase as more and more companies need in-house software. Also, it is worth noting QT has ~60 million dollars in revenue and that is definitely in the ballpark of VC backed money. You would probably have to deliver 10 million on a 1 million investment.

It mostly boils down to marketing and some quality of life improvements. Do you got a sales staff? Again, I'm in the gamedev business so I got no deep-down knowledge about GUI designer market but marketing costs are about 100% of development costs for desktop games (at the very very low end) and up to 1000% of development cost for mobile games. So in game development, marketing is the bulk of the cost, and development costs aren't all that important.

What do you think marketing costs are for GUI designers, or do you know how much QT spends on that? As an user I feel like Sciter is lacking good marketing at this stage but you can only know that and chart your way.

Please don't take any of the above advice too seriously because again I'm just a game developer, you will have to figure out this stuff yourself.

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