10 ms·

Sciter – Multiplatform HTML/CSS UI Engine for Desktop and Mobile Applications

138 points by notRobot 6y ago

jarym 6y ago
This looks quite good and pricing seems reasonable. I wonder why I’ve not come across it before. Anyone have experience of this vs Electron?
- couchcombinator 6y ago
  It's not aiming for 100% compatibility to web standards. More like a familiar way to create GUIs. Electron is a very up to date browser instance, and that is both its strength and weakness.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- vijaybritto 6y ago
  I have seen its use in Symantec. They were happy with the performance and the looks even though limited. It does a few things and does it well. Comparison with electron is not appropriate here as its like an OS altogether.
vnorilo 6y ago
I got the impression that it runs "Script" instead of js. So porting web apps is not a goal (?) Looks like something you'd use for UI in a native app.
cosmotic 6y ago
HTML/CSS based native interfaces are some of the hardest to use, least reliable, least accessible, least robust interfaces I encounter; The demo interfaces on their website all fit into the unusable pot. I admit most/all of the interfaces I've personal used are using electron/webkit/ie to render which are all quite bloated. Is this different? It's not entirely clear and would be an important differentiator. I still don't understand the draw though. The best native apps look and behave natively; using a platform like this prevents that or just makes it harder to accomplish. Using such a platform seems like it's entirely developer-focused and not-at-all user focused, which is a shame.
- realharo 6y ago
  I had a similar discussion on reddit a long time ago, and posted this screenshot of various Linux music players compared to Spotify. https://i.imgur.com/K44tJ2Y.png https://i.imgur.com/K44tJ2Y.png Lots of native UIs (especially from the past) tend to all have the same "grey boxes" look. I don't see how that's universally better. Another example was this part of Slack UI https://i.imgur.com/O71fdP5.png https://i.imgur.com/O71fdP5.png - how would you even do something like that with a typical native library? It would certainly take a lot more effort if you had to build that from a limited set of pre-existing components, instead of relying on the more free-form "rectangles and text" building blocks of the web.
  - vijaybritto 6y ago
    I'm not 100% sure but I think the slack design can be achieved in wxWidgets. Yes the native apps look bland but why would I use an app that requires 500M to play music?
    - realharo 6y ago
      Why not? If it works ok and doesn't eat battery/CPU too much when in background, then who cares? For exapmle I like that I can plug my phone into the speakers (yay headphone jack), and control the music from a laptop on the other side of the room. Also, it's more like 200 MB on my computer, most of which is predictably CEF. In comparison bundling Qt dlls would also add like 50MB if I remember correctly.
      - vijaybritto 6y ago
        I'm talking about RAM not SSD. And no I don't have multiple computers in my house. A single laptop with 16G of RAM is all I have. I have to use it for work. We all know about music apps playing music while using less than 50M at any given time. If its in the background then even less. I know the dev experience is far greater in electron but its simply not performant. But if I were to launch a product on all platforms then I'll go for electron probably cause its the fastest to market
cosmotic 6y ago
Using 'modern' to describe the platform doesn't communicate anything to me as a developer. Tell me what makes it modern. Tell me why its better. Is it lighter weight? is it easier to develop with? is it better for my users? is it less buggy than other frameworks?
tluyben2 6y ago
I have never used this but something better for GUI would be great even if commercial; what I miss (as a native GUI dev) with all(? if you know any besides framework7 which is basically only mobile) of these html/css frameworks is that there is no equivalent of a control library that can be rapidly used without using (bucketloads) of css. When you browse the examples you see that most have some desktop controls like menus etc; I don't want to 'make' those; I just want to start with a theme (Material) and (as backend dev) never touch css while still being able to make something that looks ok and works like an actual GUI app instead of a web page. Like I can (and do) do in native tech all the time. Is there anything with Electron-ish apps (Sciter is preferable it seems as it has less bloat)? I searched for instance for a desktop theme for Electron and only found a mac os x theme which indeed works like described above but I don't want everything to look like mac os x or windows or linux or ios or android; either it should look native-ish (nothing beats native though) on the platform it runs on , or it should look like something completely 'new'.
- realharo 6y ago
  Another discussion from today (React Native Windows / Mac) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23160075 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23160075 Not web/HTML though, uses native widgets directly (mostly).
  - tluyben2 6y ago
    Yeah, I'm using RN + Flutter and it's ok. But I'm not sure why there are more prepackaged web-based solutions. I might/seem to be alone in that wish, so i'll use what works in anger.
  - still_grokking 6y ago
    >I have never used this but something better for GUI would be great even if commercial; what I miss (as a native GUI dev) with all(? if you know any besides framework7 which is basically only mobile) of these html/css frameworks is that there is no equivalent of a control library that can be rapidly used without using (bucketloads) of css. When you browse the examples you see that most have some desktop controls like menus etc; I don't want to 'make' those; I just want to start with a theme (Material) and (as backend dev) never touch css while still being able to make something that looks ok and works like an actual GUI app instead of a web page. Like I can (and do) do in native tech all the time. In this regard even Visual Basic was far ahead of most of today's client tech. HTML/CSS/JS are not even close to be called a serious GUI stack for applications despite they are used for that as the Web ate the world.
qwerty456127 6y ago
> Various GUI frameworks offer different UI declaration and styling languages, such as QML and XAML (Microsoft WPF). On the contrary, Sciter allows using time proven, robust, and flexible HTML What a remarkable piece of bullshit. QML and XAML have been designed from scratch right for UI mark-up, HTML is a legacy document mark-up language we are doomed to carry on together with gargantuan rendering engines and the whole pandemonium of frameworks while making UIs.
- c-smile 6y ago
  Each dinosaur was modern for its time. And so was XAML. Time is passing and now it takes significant excavation effort to find out a project that uses it. Git-for-desktop used to be a XAML app, now it is an Electron app. And so on. QML is a palliative or compromise if you wish: let's take existing widget-tree-based UI and add some declarativeness to it at least to compete somehow with the web tech stack flexibility and explosion of ideas. Desperate move I would say. As an C++ UI developer and then UI architect I was working on one project that transitioned from pure desktop VB + native application to pure Web based app. So "I've been there, seen that" and many times since then, all pro et contra of all these. At some point I've asked myself the question: "Ok, what would you add to Web UI stack so it will be really useful on desktop?" So I took C++ again and made the Sciter. It is a modern engine that works as on modern high-res monitors and GPU hardware as on ancient XP machines. It supports as retained UI as immediate ones a la ImGUI. As C++, Go, Rust, Delphi as script. As Angular (data bound UI) and React UI (vDOM,JSX) approaches as classic direct element tree composition from native code. Yes, all this is using HTML/CSS vocabulary because it is a) convenient and flexible, b) 90% of UI developers are Web developers these days and c) HTML/CSS are here now and for generations to come.
mratsim 6y ago
Assuming you want a very lightweight HTML/CSS UI engine, I think you can get 80% of the way by using webview[1]. It's very tiny (1200 lines single-header file). I actually wouldn't be surprised if it used webview internally. [1]: https://github.com/zserge/webview https://github.com/zserge/webview
- realharo 6y ago
  This may be a lot more viable today than it would have been in the past when there were huge compatibility issues between browsers (e.g. which IE version does the user have on their system?). Especially with the Chromium-based Edge in the future.
- c-smile 6y ago
  Sciter does not use webview or any other existing browser engine implementation. I did HTML/CSS and script engines by myself. The only place where I intersected with WebKit and Gecko teams is at WHATWG and then HTML WG at W3C in design of HTML5 specification and portions of CSS3.
adev_ 6y ago
Does anyone know if there is any plan to port that on Mobile ( iOs / Android ) ? That would be a killer feature. Even if I am not sure it would be even legal to port that to iOS with Apple's restrictions on the Web Engines they accept in the Store.
- c-smile 6y ago
  It works on Android: https://sciter.com/sciter-lite-is-published/ https://sciter.com/sciter-lite-is-published/ and I have internal builds for iOS. For the moment it is available only as a static lib to be linked into an application. I am trying to come up with a runtime model that will allow to build applications as simple as > sciter-build /ui/res/folder -platform="xxx"
zerof1l 6y ago
My main concern with this would be the security and W3 standard support. Browser engines and whatnot do make your life easy, but they add a lot of attack vectors. Also the support for W3 standard is usually limited and incomplete. Also it seems that the engine itself is distributed as binary only? I can't find source anywhere. That's a -1 for security.
- kevingadd 6y ago
  From browsing the docs, it looks like scripts can open sockets so it makes it much easier to jump from exploiting an app's Sciter frontend to attacking other targets
  - c-smile 6y ago
    These functions are off by default, check: https://sciter.com/security-in-sciter-based-applications/ https://sciter.com/security-in-sciter-based-applications/ Even more, you can compile Sciter without them completely.
frusciante19 6y ago
I'm not sure on which planet antivirus software UI is considered modern or usable.
stareatgoats 6y ago
This has been posted a few times to HN [0] and I've looked into it superficially without actually trying it out. For the benefit of anyone interested, these are my tentative conclusions. Please correct me if I've misunderstood anything. Sciter is a small company (single person ?) project, but the list of enterprise clients is an assurance. Their flavor of Javascript (TIscript) diverged from ECMAScipt more than 10 years ago, so there would be syntax switching involved when developing in Sciter and doing normal web development in parallel. There are similar issues with the DOM and CSS. But the list of included libraries certainly look like it could compensate for some of that, with implementations that can mimic modern features like promises and CSS3 transitions. [1] Also, as far as I can see it is not truly cross-platform, i.e. it can not easily be deployed to mobile. Pricing (even if fair comparatively) and the closed source is also a roadblock (for me). There was a thread by the author on Reddit some time back that vented the idea of open-sourcing the library. That could tip the balance (for me). [2] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13057526 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13057526 [1] https://sciter.com/download/ https://sciter.com/download/ [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/a8vkzm/sciternode_as_an_alternative_to_electron/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/a8vkzm/scitern...
- notRobot 6y ago
  Relevant article by Sciter's author: "Making Sciter Open Source" https://terrainformatica.com/2019/09/13/making-sciter-open-source/ https://terrainformatica.com/2019/09/13/making-sciter-open-s...
- fabian2k 6y ago
  Using a Javscript dialect is a huge disadvantage in my opinion. I have worked with a similar dialect, and even if the language is pretty close to Javascript, a huge issue is that it breaks all tools and editors you would usually use. You have to rely entirely on the developers of that dialect to supply the tools you need. And this situation only gets worse over time, as you're decoupled from the improvements of the language. Especially once there are a bunch of changes in the dialect that conflict with later developments of the parent language. My experience is also that there is inevitably more friction than you might expect when integrating libraries from the parent language. For me this would be an immediate dealbreaker, it's just not worth it to tie yourself to a small dialect like this.
edandersen 6y ago
Using screenshots of Norton Internet Security is not good marketing.
- fredsanford 6y ago
  The first time I saw that goofy symantec UI 10 or more years ago I named it the clownterface... And quickly uninstalled it. A supposed "enterprise" application that makes your whole machine unstable.
tenaciousDaniel 6y ago
I wonder why we see so many of these attempts at bringing html/css to native, while we (or at least I) see so few examples of the inverse. I loved creating iOS apps with autolayout. Some parts of it were a bit frustrating, sure, but you could do things that were pretty hard with css. Why don't we see any lib for "make an app just as if you were making it for native, but now it runs on the web!"
- stbn 6y ago
  Google Web Toolkit [1] does this. [1] http://www.gwtproject.org/ http://www.gwtproject.org/
  - alexhutcheson 6y ago
    GWT hasn't had a new release since 2017: http://www.gwtproject.org/release-notes.html http://www.gwtproject.org/release-notes.html
- readarticle 6y ago
  There are probably 100 web devs for every iOS / Android dev.
c-smile 6y ago
Sciter's author here. Couple of words about "native UI" and on statements like: "I (a hard-core software developer) prefer gray boxes". You (as a software developer), is one of 1% of UI users. But rest of us (99%, sic!) consume UI in form of Web sites, right? So "Native UI" these days shall look closer to default Bootstrap theme then to something that OS provides. My wife (as an example) has Windows notebook, iPhone and Android based book reader - "native UI" for her is meaningless at best. About desktop applications in general... There are two major types of applications: a) the ones used time to time / rarely; b) and productive applications used 24/7 - parts of job workflow. The ones that used time to time (what I name as "one big red button applications") must have descriptive UI - e.g. hot-keys don't work there - no one is bothered to remember them. So the UI shall be self descriptive, pictographic, etc. 1 second looking on window to make decision what to use. Such applications must follow modern UI trends - who will trust antivirus if it looks as dinosaur from prehistoric times? That's why AV vendors prefer to use CSS, just to minimize maintenance costs, see: https://sciter.com/from-skeuomorph-to-flat-ui-evolution-of-one-application/ https://sciter.com/from-skeuomorph-to-flat-ui-evolution-of-o... Productive applications: MS Office, Adobe Suite, even IDEs like Visual Studio, JetBrain, SublimeText, VSCode, etc. None of these are using "native UI" as you know. One of the reasons: "native UI" is not expressive enough. Another reason: these are complex UI systems with complex data model underneath and so complex update graphs. They prefer GC-able runtime environments for those reasons. Yet there are c), d) up until z) reasons why they do that, I can speak about that forever, e.g. Adobe Suite must be cross-platform, right? So when you use "native UI" please take the above into consideration.
- paulryanrogers 6y ago
  Native to the platform is the common meaning on HN. Native to users is a good point, though orthogonal to reasons HN users may prefer platform-native: lower memory and CPU usage, platform style, familiar shortcuts and behavior.
  - c-smile 6y ago
    > orthogonal to reasons That's my impression too. I suspect that those "gray boxes" talks (a.k.a. buttons a la turrets of Panzerkampfwagen VI Tiger) are orthogonal to GUI in general. Yet "memory and CPU usage" is also orthogonal to HTML/CSS per se. One of strict requirements of AntiVirus applications is to to consume as low memory and CPU as possible. And most of AVs are using HTML/CSS UI these days. And so Sciter code works on 600 mln PCs and Macs as a part of these applications. In fact the main motivator why Sciter started using GPU for UI rendering was R&D director of Norton Antivirus when high-res monitors started to arrive. Retina monitors have 9 times more pixels to rasterize than old 96 ppi monitors. GPU is the only option for the GUI at post-Moore era.
naasking 6y ago
Speaking of UI, please set a max-width on your text. My eyes shouldn't have to scan across my whole screen to read your intro blurb. I'm now using the Just Read addon to read your site.
LockAndLol 6y ago
So did they write their own layout and JS engine? Or does this use Blink / another dependency under the hood? I found this https://sciter.com/developers/engine-architecture/ https://sciter.com/developers/engine-architecture/ but it doesn't say if it's all written from scratch or using other libs.
- tomku 6y ago
  It's completely written from scratch, and does not aim for compliance with web standards.

138 points by notRobot 6y ago

This looks quite good and pricing seems reasonable. I wonder why I’ve not come across it before. Anyone have experience of this vs Electron?

couchcombinator 6y ago
It's not aiming for 100% compatibility to web standards. More like a familiar way to create GUIs. Electron is a very up to date browser instance, and that is both its strength and weakness.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
vijaybritto 6y ago
I have seen its use in Symantec. They were happy with the performance and the looks even though limited. It does a few things and does it well. Comparison with electron is not appropriate here as its like an OS altogether.

vnorilo 6y ago

I got the impression that it runs "Script" instead of js. So porting web apps is not a goal (?) Looks like something you'd use for UI in a native app.

cosmotic 6y ago

HTML/CSS based native interfaces are some of the hardest to use, least reliable, least accessible, least robust interfaces I encounter; The demo interfaces on their website all fit into the unusable pot. I admit most/all of the interfaces I've personal used are using electron/webkit/ie to render which are all quite bloated. Is this different? It's not entirely clear and would be an important differentiator. I still don't understand the draw though. The best native apps look and behave natively; using a platform like this prevents that or just makes it harder to accomplish. Using such a platform seems like it's entirely developer-focused and not-at-all user focused, which is a shame.

realharo 6y ago
I had a similar discussion on reddit a long time ago, and posted this screenshot of various Linux music players compared to Spotify. https://i.imgur.com/K44tJ2Y.png https://i.imgur.com/K44tJ2Y.png Lots of native UIs (especially from the past) tend to all have the same "grey boxes" look. I don't see how that's universally better. Another example was this part of Slack UI https://i.imgur.com/O71fdP5.png https://i.imgur.com/O71fdP5.png - how would you even do something like that with a typical native library? It would certainly take a lot more effort if you had to build that from a limited set of pre-existing components, instead of relying on the more free-form "rectangles and text" building blocks of the web.
- vijaybritto 6y ago
  I'm not 100% sure but I think the slack design can be achieved in wxWidgets. Yes the native apps look bland but why would I use an app that requires 500M to play music?
  - realharo 6y ago
    Why not? If it works ok and doesn't eat battery/CPU too much when in background, then who cares? For exapmle I like that I can plug my phone into the speakers (yay headphone jack), and control the music from a laptop on the other side of the room. Also, it's more like 200 MB on my computer, most of which is predictably CEF. In comparison bundling Qt dlls would also add like 50MB if I remember correctly.
    - vijaybritto 6y ago
      I'm talking about RAM not SSD. And no I don't have multiple computers in my house. A single laptop with 16G of RAM is all I have. I have to use it for work. We all know about music apps playing music while using less than 50M at any given time. If its in the background then even less. I know the dev experience is far greater in electron but its simply not performant. But if I were to launch a product on all platforms then I'll go for electron probably cause its the fastest to market

cosmotic 6y ago

Using 'modern' to describe the platform doesn't communicate anything to me as a developer. Tell me what makes it modern. Tell me why its better. Is it lighter weight? is it easier to develop with? is it better for my users? is it less buggy than other frameworks?

tluyben2 6y ago

I have never used this but something better for GUI would be great even if commercial; what I miss (as a native GUI dev) with all(? if you know any besides framework7 which is basically only mobile) of these html/css frameworks is that there is no equivalent of a control library that can be rapidly used without using (bucketloads) of css. When you browse the examples you see that most have some desktop controls like menus etc; I don't want to 'make' those; I just want to start with a theme (Material) and (as backend dev) never touch css while still being able to make something that looks ok and works like an actual GUI app instead of a web page. Like I can (and do) do in native tech all the time. Is there anything with Electron-ish apps (Sciter is preferable it seems as it has less bloat)? I searched for instance for a desktop theme for Electron and only found a mac os x theme which indeed works like described above but I don't want everything to look like mac os x or windows or linux or ios or android; either it should look native-ish (nothing beats native though) on the platform it runs on , or it should look like something completely 'new'.

realharo 6y ago
Another discussion from today (React Native Windows / Mac) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23160075 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23160075 Not web/HTML though, uses native widgets directly (mostly).
- tluyben2 6y ago
  Yeah, I'm using RN + Flutter and it's ok. But I'm not sure why there are more prepackaged web-based solutions. I might/seem to be alone in that wish, so i'll use what works in anger.
- still_grokking 6y ago
  >I have never used this but something better for GUI would be great even if commercial; what I miss (as a native GUI dev) with all(? if you know any besides framework7 which is basically only mobile) of these html/css frameworks is that there is no equivalent of a control library that can be rapidly used without using (bucketloads) of css. When you browse the examples you see that most have some desktop controls like menus etc; I don't want to 'make' those; I just want to start with a theme (Material) and (as backend dev) never touch css while still being able to make something that looks ok and works like an actual GUI app instead of a web page. Like I can (and do) do in native tech all the time. In this regard even Visual Basic was far ahead of most of today's client tech. HTML/CSS/JS are not even close to be called a serious GUI stack for applications despite they are used for that as the Web ate the world.

qwerty456127 6y ago

> Various GUI frameworks offer different UI declaration and styling languages, such as QML and XAML (Microsoft WPF). On the contrary, Sciter allows using time proven, robust, and flexible HTML What a remarkable piece of bullshit. QML and XAML have been designed from scratch right for UI mark-up, HTML is a legacy document mark-up language we are doomed to carry on together with gargantuan rendering engines and the whole pandemonium of frameworks while making UIs.

c-smile 6y ago
Each dinosaur was modern for its time. And so was XAML. Time is passing and now it takes significant excavation effort to find out a project that uses it. Git-for-desktop used to be a XAML app, now it is an Electron app. And so on. QML is a palliative or compromise if you wish: let's take existing widget-tree-based UI and add some declarativeness to it at least to compete somehow with the web tech stack flexibility and explosion of ideas. Desperate move I would say. As an C++ UI developer and then UI architect I was working on one project that transitioned from pure desktop VB + native application to pure Web based app. So "I've been there, seen that" and many times since then, all pro et contra of all these. At some point I've asked myself the question: "Ok, what would you add to Web UI stack so it will be really useful on desktop?" So I took C++ again and made the Sciter. It is a modern engine that works as on modern high-res monitors and GPU hardware as on ancient XP machines. It supports as retained UI as immediate ones a la ImGUI. As C++, Go, Rust, Delphi as script. As Angular (data bound UI) and React UI (vDOM,JSX) approaches as classic direct element tree composition from native code. Yes, all this is using HTML/CSS vocabulary because it is a) convenient and flexible, b) 90% of UI developers are Web developers these days and c) HTML/CSS are here now and for generations to come.

mratsim 6y ago

Assuming you want a very lightweight HTML/CSS UI engine, I think you can get 80% of the way by using webview[1]. It's very tiny (1200 lines single-header file). I actually wouldn't be surprised if it used webview internally. [1]: https://github.com/zserge/webview https://github.com/zserge/webview

realharo 6y ago
This may be a lot more viable today than it would have been in the past when there were huge compatibility issues between browsers (e.g. which IE version does the user have on their system?). Especially with the Chromium-based Edge in the future.
c-smile 6y ago
Sciter does not use webview or any other existing browser engine implementation. I did HTML/CSS and script engines by myself. The only place where I intersected with WebKit and Gecko teams is at WHATWG and then HTML WG at W3C in design of HTML5 specification and portions of CSS3.

adev_ 6y ago

Does anyone know if there is any plan to port that on Mobile ( iOs / Android ) ? That would be a killer feature. Even if I am not sure it would be even legal to port that to iOS with Apple's restrictions on the Web Engines they accept in the Store.

c-smile 6y ago
It works on Android: https://sciter.com/sciter-lite-is-published/ https://sciter.com/sciter-lite-is-published/ and I have internal builds for iOS. For the moment it is available only as a static lib to be linked into an application. I am trying to come up with a runtime model that will allow to build applications as simple as > sciter-build /ui/res/folder -platform="xxx"

zerof1l 6y ago

My main concern with this would be the security and W3 standard support. Browser engines and whatnot do make your life easy, but they add a lot of attack vectors. Also the support for W3 standard is usually limited and incomplete. Also it seems that the engine itself is distributed as binary only? I can't find source anywhere. That's a -1 for security.

kevingadd 6y ago
From browsing the docs, it looks like scripts can open sockets so it makes it much easier to jump from exploiting an app's Sciter frontend to attacking other targets
- c-smile 6y ago
  These functions are off by default, check: https://sciter.com/security-in-sciter-based-applications/ https://sciter.com/security-in-sciter-based-applications/ Even more, you can compile Sciter without them completely.

frusciante19 6y ago

I'm not sure on which planet antivirus software UI is considered modern or usable.

stareatgoats 6y ago

This has been posted a few times to HN [0] and I've looked into it superficially without actually trying it out. For the benefit of anyone interested, these are my tentative conclusions. Please correct me if I've misunderstood anything. Sciter is a small company (single person ?) project, but the list of enterprise clients is an assurance. Their flavor of Javascript (TIscript) diverged from ECMAScipt more than 10 years ago, so there would be syntax switching involved when developing in Sciter and doing normal web development in parallel. There are similar issues with the DOM and CSS. But the list of included libraries certainly look like it could compensate for some of that, with implementations that can mimic modern features like promises and CSS3 transitions. [1] Also, as far as I can see it is not truly cross-platform, i.e. it can not easily be deployed to mobile. Pricing (even if fair comparatively) and the closed source is also a roadblock (for me). There was a thread by the author on Reddit some time back that vented the idea of open-sourcing the library. That could tip the balance (for me). [2] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13057526 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13057526 [1] https://sciter.com/download/ https://sciter.com/download/ [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/a8vkzm/sciternode_as_an_alternative_to_electron/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/a8vkzm/scitern...

notRobot 6y ago
Relevant article by Sciter's author: "Making Sciter Open Source" https://terrainformatica.com/2019/09/13/making-sciter-open-source/ https://terrainformatica.com/2019/09/13/making-sciter-open-s...
fabian2k 6y ago
Using a Javscript dialect is a huge disadvantage in my opinion. I have worked with a similar dialect, and even if the language is pretty close to Javascript, a huge issue is that it breaks all tools and editors you would usually use. You have to rely entirely on the developers of that dialect to supply the tools you need. And this situation only gets worse over time, as you're decoupled from the improvements of the language. Especially once there are a bunch of changes in the dialect that conflict with later developments of the parent language. My experience is also that there is inevitably more friction than you might expect when integrating libraries from the parent language. For me this would be an immediate dealbreaker, it's just not worth it to tie yourself to a small dialect like this.

edandersen 6y ago

Using screenshots of Norton Internet Security is not good marketing.

fredsanford 6y ago
The first time I saw that goofy symantec UI 10 or more years ago I named it the clownterface... And quickly uninstalled it. A supposed "enterprise" application that makes your whole machine unstable.

tenaciousDaniel 6y ago

I wonder why we see so many of these attempts at bringing html/css to native, while we (or at least I) see so few examples of the inverse. I loved creating iOS apps with autolayout. Some parts of it were a bit frustrating, sure, but you could do things that were pretty hard with css. Why don't we see any lib for "make an app just as if you were making it for native, but now it runs on the web!"

stbn 6y ago
Google Web Toolkit [1] does this. [1] http://www.gwtproject.org/ http://www.gwtproject.org/
- alexhutcheson 6y ago
  GWT hasn't had a new release since 2017: http://www.gwtproject.org/release-notes.html http://www.gwtproject.org/release-notes.html
readarticle 6y ago
There are probably 100 web devs for every iOS / Android dev.

c-smile 6y ago

Sciter's author here. Couple of words about "native UI" and on statements like: "I (a hard-core software developer) prefer gray boxes". You (as a software developer), is one of 1% of UI users. But rest of us (99%, sic!) consume UI in form of Web sites, right? So "Native UI" these days shall look closer to default Bootstrap theme then to something that OS provides. My wife (as an example) has Windows notebook, iPhone and Android based book reader - "native UI" for her is meaningless at best. About desktop applications in general... There are two major types of applications: a) the ones used time to time / rarely; b) and productive applications used 24/7 - parts of job workflow. The ones that used time to time (what I name as "one big red button applications") must have descriptive UI - e.g. hot-keys don't work there - no one is bothered to remember them. So the UI shall be self descriptive, pictographic, etc. 1 second looking on window to make decision what to use. Such applications must follow modern UI trends - who will trust antivirus if it looks as dinosaur from prehistoric times? That's why AV vendors prefer to use CSS, just to minimize maintenance costs, see: https://sciter.com/from-skeuomorph-to-flat-ui-evolution-of-one-application/ https://sciter.com/from-skeuomorph-to-flat-ui-evolution-of-o... Productive applications: MS Office, Adobe Suite, even IDEs like Visual Studio, JetBrain, SublimeText, VSCode, etc. None of these are using "native UI" as you know. One of the reasons: "native UI" is not expressive enough. Another reason: these are complex UI systems with complex data model underneath and so complex update graphs. They prefer GC-able runtime environments for those reasons. Yet there are c), d) up until z) reasons why they do that, I can speak about that forever, e.g. Adobe Suite must be cross-platform, right? So when you use "native UI" please take the above into consideration.

paulryanrogers 6y ago
Native to the platform is the common meaning on HN. Native to users is a good point, though orthogonal to reasons HN users may prefer platform-native: lower memory and CPU usage, platform style, familiar shortcuts and behavior.
- c-smile 6y ago
  > orthogonal to reasons That's my impression too. I suspect that those "gray boxes" talks (a.k.a. buttons a la turrets of Panzerkampfwagen VI Tiger) are orthogonal to GUI in general. Yet "memory and CPU usage" is also orthogonal to HTML/CSS per se. One of strict requirements of AntiVirus applications is to to consume as low memory and CPU as possible. And most of AVs are using HTML/CSS UI these days. And so Sciter code works on 600 mln PCs and Macs as a part of these applications. In fact the main motivator why Sciter started using GPU for UI rendering was R&D director of Norton Antivirus when high-res monitors started to arrive. Retina monitors have 9 times more pixels to rasterize than old 96 ppi monitors. GPU is the only option for the GUI at post-Moore era.

naasking 6y ago

Speaking of UI, please set a max-width on your text. My eyes shouldn't have to scan across my whole screen to read your intro blurb. I'm now using the Just Read addon to read your site.

LockAndLol 6y ago

So did they write their own layout and JS engine? Or does this use Blink / another dependency under the hood? I found this https://sciter.com/developers/engine-architecture/ https://sciter.com/developers/engine-architecture/ but it doesn't say if it's all written from scratch or using other libs.

tomku 6y ago
It's completely written from scratch, and does not aim for compliance with web standards.