It's not confidence-inspiring that https://webui.me throws security warnings. I'd want folks to make applications "that make applications" to take security a little more seriously.
You never saw a website down before or what? :D
Web browser as GUI, with your preferred language in the backend
181–187 of 187 posts
Re: Web browser as GUI, with your preferred language in the backend
#182So can I deploy a Django app with this with sqlite?
Yes you can!
Nice, the Django ORM + https://www.django-unicorn.com/ makes for very quick prototyping of UIs.
Re: Web browser as GUI, with your preferred language in the backend
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
Worse developer experience and worse style options though
I strongly disagree with that. WinForms is imho very easy to use.
Easy to use initially, because of the designer. But as the application scales, it becomes more and more painful. Thinking about components randomly disappearing but still being there, designer crashes. Small changes that require you to manually drag around 60% of the form, to add or remove one field.
Re: Web browser as GUI, with your preferred language in the backend
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
Worse developer experience and worse style options though
A few years back I prototyped a b2b web app using winforms. At this point in time I'd been writing react for 2 years non stop and I hadn't used winforms for at least 5 years. I started up visual studio, and used the GUI builder to make a fully featured data bound winforms app connected to my backend in less than a day. 2 months later I had the react version up and running. Was the react version shinier? Yes. But the…
I use both svelte and WinForms at my day job.
The designer works quite well initially for laying out the groundwork but after a while it becomes a burden:
- components randomly disappearing but still being there when running the program
- designer crashes
- Small changes that require you to manually drag around 60% of the form, to add or remove one field
Svelte ain't perfect and it requires more scaffolding initially but you get: - actually good data bindings and state management (in many places you would need event handlers for winforms) - hot reload (very big win) - the ability to do greater layout changes with a few css lines (in combination with hot reload quite pleasant to style) - mass styling without selecting every component every time you want to change something - native async/await integration in the ui framework
plus the rest of the benefits (not DX oriented) - gpu rendered instead of cpu rendered - runs on any OS (including phones) - advanced responsiveness via CSS
(sorry for the poor text layout, didn't yet find a way to insert line breaks without them being removed)
Re: Web browser as GUI, with your preferred language in the backend
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
A few years back I prototyped a b2b web app using winforms. At this point in time I'd been writing react for 2 years non stop and I hadn't used winforms for at least 5 years. I started up visual studio, and used the GUI builder to make a fully featured data bound winforms app connected to my backend in less than a day. 2 months later I had the react version up and running. Was the react version shinier? Yes. But the…
I use both svelte and WinForms at my day job. The designer works quite well initially for laying out the groundwork but after a while it becomes a burden: - components randomly disappearing but still being there when running the program - designer crashes - Small changes that require you to manually drag around 60% of the form, to add or remove one field Svelte ain't perfect and it requires more scaffolding initially…
Svelte is my go to on the web as well.
For smaller apps (dozen input fields or so) the WinForms designer (which has been on life support for well over a decade now!) will get the job done better than anything else out there.
If you want GPU rendered, WPF has you covered. I strongly dislike XAML, even though I like JSX (while disliking data handling in react in general).
The thing about responsiveness is I can make 6 UIs in WinForms faster than I can fix cross platform CSS bugs.
The real issue is WinForms isn't cross platform. :(
Re: Web browser as GUI, with your preferred language in the backend
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
Better user experience and many styling options are counterproductive for the UX.
Better user experience (UX) is counterproductive for the UX... wut
I think poster is trying to stay that too many styling options has made for worse UX.
Users can get used to ugly and consistent. On the web and mobile, there is minimal consistency of what a button even looks like, or where site options are to be found, every site looks different and every company has its own style guide.
Re: Web browser as GUI, with your preferred language in the backend
#187This is definitely the way to go! The browser is not only good at network requests and sandboxing but comes with the most powerful layouting system and rendering engine. So yes, leveraging browsers just for the front-end of a local-first app is such a good direction to go. Generally apps tend to bundle their own browser runtime to leverage this component. Even the lighter weight electron alternatives tend to either i…
This is how Plex works
Wow I had no idea and I'm a web dev. Have they published about that anywhere?