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Show HN: A backend agnostic Ruby framework for building reactive desktop apps

92 points by zero-st4rs 1y ago

For a year or two I've been building a UI library with the aim of making desktop applications fun and easy to write. It is currently written in C/Ruby and uses a custom tree sitter grammar to describe templates. Features include: composable UI components, template directives, event and prop handling, slots, styles and automation capabilities baked in. One of the goals of the project is privileging easy to write custom components via a drawing API over providing a fixed set of components. At the time of this writing it should install on Windows, Mac, and Linux, but sometimes it is hard to test the install on all platforms. I'd love to hear any feedback or suggestions on the project. It is still in an early stage, but it would be great to hear thoughts. Docs are here: https://hokusai.skinnyjames.net/ https://hokusai.skinnyjames.net/ Repo is here: https://codeberg.org/skinnyjames/hokusai https://codeberg.org/skinnyjames/hokusai Licensed under the PPL

whalesalad 1y ago
How would you compare this to RubyMotion?
- zero-st4rs 1y ago
  Great question. From what I understand of RubyMotion, it compiles directly to native, calling into Objective C APIs, and like DragonRuby the Ruby implementation is not MRI. Since Hokusai uses MRI, one can pull in from that ecosystem of gems. RubyMotion also appears to support (iOS, Android, OSX) whereas Hokusai intends to support OSX, Linux, and Windows. Implementation-wise, the framework itself seems different. Looking at the following [RubyMotion app](https://github.com/HipByte/RubyMotionSamples/tree/master/ios/CircleLayout/app https://github.com/HipByte/RubyMotionSamples/tree/master/ios...), the logic is spread out over separate files and it doesn't appear to have a templating language. On the other hand, Hokusai UI components are just a class that inherits from Hokusai::Block, and are self contained blocks that can be stitched together. Hokusai is more like Vue Single file components in this regard. Hokusai also doesn't make a distinction between a "component" and an "app", they are all just Blocks. Does that answer your question?
iraliaf 1y ago
this is really cool, thanks for contributing to the ruby ecosystem!! Do you have any example sites? I couldn't find a reference on your overview
- zero-st4rs 1y ago
  Yup! https://hokusai.skinnyjames.net https://hokusai.skinnyjames.net has a guide with screenshots. The repo itself has more examples.
dismalaf 1y ago
Looks really cool. Just a curiosity though, why xmake instead of rake?
- zero-st4rs 1y ago
  Good question! Most of the development build fetches and compiles C dependencies. xmake happens to be really good at this, especially considering xmake-repo. Rake tasks don't have builtins for this iirc.
az09mugen 1y ago
Very cool project, and well thought with the choice of Raylib or SDL2. But since Raylib can compile to Android (https://github.com/raysan5/raylib/blob/master/examples/Makefile.Android https://github.com/raysan5/raylib/blob/master/examples/Makef...), do you think it could be difficult to add Android as a target platform ?
- zero-st4rs 1y ago
  Interesting, for sure. I don't know much about Ruby on android (the resulting application will absolutely need a ruby interpreter) but I thought Windows would be a no-op and I got it working there, so who knows? :)
  - az09mugen 1y ago
    Ahah nice, I will definitively craft some GUIs for fun with your lib and make you some feedback. Thanks for this project !
samiv 1y ago
Cool.. I guess but I just wonder.. is writing the UIs in code an actual practice that people do these days? I program (mostly) in C++ using Qt for my UIs and I just use the Qt Designer to visually drag and drop to build my UIs and the actual code gets generated by the tool. Fast and simple.
- zero-st4rs 1y ago
  Pretty cool! I've heard a lot of good things about Qt.
- sunrunner 1y ago
  As an end user, what's the licensing situation like with Qt? I was looking to build a cross-platform desktop application (down the rabbit hole...) and was frustrated with the number of options that were just a web view of some sort and some bindings to a JS/TS framework of your choice (I don't have one and don't really want to have to use one or bundle it with the application). Qt looked interesting, particularly with the concise syntax afforted by QML and QtQuick, but the licensing was off-putting and even just getting access (for a non-commercial project for example) seemed to require an awkward sign-up and some kind of installer. I crave the conciseness and simplicity of something like SwiftUI but the options for doing that in a cross-platform way seem limited.
  - samiv 1y ago
    It's double licensed. The Qt Company offers both a commercial and LGPL license but they do their best to bury and hide the LGPL option and use dark patterns to try to trick one to get the commercial license. They also want to push you towards getting an account with them for the installer. That being said the packages (without online installer) are also available for direct download when you know where to look... [see link below] If you're on Linux though the situation is much simpler since your distribution most likely already packages the Qt libs so you just use your package manager to install them and off you go... Regardless, for anyone looking for a native portable toolkit, I don't really think there's anything that comes close to Qt in terms of functionality and tooling (like Qt Creator and Qt Designer) and once you get over the idiosyncrasies and quirks its really quite good (for the most part). https://download.qt.io/official_releases/qt/ https://download.qt.io/official_releases/qt/
xfalcox 1y ago
This looks super cool, exactly what I've been wanting to create some useful widgets! Thanks for sharing!
- zero-st4rs 1y ago
  Thanks! I'm really interested to hear how it "plays" for people. Would love updates if you use it.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
jenadine 1y ago
First time I hear about "copyfarleft license". I wonder what that means in practice for such a library.
- zero-st4rs 1y ago
  Thanks for raising this question. From the discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43938309 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43938309, it probably won't stay PPL for much longer. It just needs to be worked out.
viraptor 1y ago
Could you add some information about licence? Currently I don't know what is it compatible with and it's not listed on OSI. So unless someone's up for reading lots of legalese, it's not easy to use/publish.
- maxmcd 1y ago
  https://ball.disco.coop/Peer_Production_License https://ball.disco.coop/Peer_Production_License
  - viraptor 1y ago
    Yeah, this still doesn't answer: can I use this with agpl, gpl, lgpl, apache2, others. The summary on top seems to imply that it's not AGPL/GPL compatible since it talks about granting specific types of organisations some monetization privileges. It doesn't simplify what the rules are (what qualifies as use?), without having to read the licence itself. On the first read it's basically: compatible with BSD-like and PPL... and not much else? It actually seems to break the licensing itself - the colorize gem is GPL2, which seems not compatible with PPL. https://github.com/fazibear/colorize/blob/master/LICENSE https://github.com/fazibear/colorize/blob/master/LICENSE https://codeberg.org/skinnyjames/hokusai/src/commit/5380728dd8e6c092b0d2573f9caf07d190891a65/hokusai.gemspec#L19 https://codeberg.org/skinnyjames/hokusai/src/commit/5380728d...
    - zero-st4rs 1y ago
      Yeah, the main thing I understand about PPL is that it behaves like the GPL license, but has provisions for worker owned cooperatives or non-profits. 4.c. (Looking at the information again around this license, I suspect I may be incorrect though) And you are correct, including colorize does break GPL2, I'm surprised I missed that. Any lawyers out there? :)
      - kirushik 1y ago
        Disclaimer: I am not a legal professional (in any jurisdiction), and this is not any form of an official advice. But I've happened to work as "engineer in licensing and copy activation" for one of the major FOSS vendors, and then being a licensing compliance officer in another large-ish FOSS project; and here are my 2¢: You are indeed in violation of GPL2 when building on top of GPL2-licensed code and giving it a non-compatible license. And PPL is explicitly non-compatible, since it restricts the "four freedoms of FOSS" for some actors (as despicable as they might be), while GPL is explicitly restricting any form of judgement when providing the four freedoms. On a more general note — I appreciate the spirit and the intention behind your licensing choice, but unfortunately in practice this would mean severe impediment for hokusai adoption. Like, it would be technically hard/impossible to include hokusai and derived works into any software packets distribution: they both technically and by policy are usually restricted to "clear, well-known licenses" (which typically means OSI/FSF-recognized ones), and it might not even be possible to express your licensing choice when putting the code up there. And who would pick a GUI toolkit to build with, when the resulting code can't even be published in the package repos of their Linux distro of choice? On a more fundamental level (and I start feeling out of my depth here a little bit) — Creative Commons licenses and their derivatives are usually not a great fit for software code. Eg right here in the comments someone already mentioned that it's not clear what constitutes "use" of your codebase — and indeed, the text of your license mostly focuses on Reproduction, Distribution and Adaptation. If I build and html-based webapp on hokusai, run it on my own server, and you open the page — is this Distribution or Reproduction, for whom of us? Even worse, if hokusai is being used in a startup which assigned shares (not options) to its founding engineers, but not to everyone — is it a "worker-owned business" or not? What about an exploitive business which frames itself as a coop/NGO/whatever, but frames it actual workers as contractors (Uber-style)? Legally it might pass the benchmark outlined in PPL, but in practice it might be even more exploitative than just hiring someone at the labor market rates. Same with an org which exploits unpaid interns or volunteers...
omneity 1y ago
This is reminding me a lot of shoes.rb (in a good way) Awesome work!
- zero-st4rs 1y ago
  Thanks! _why is the person who really sparked my love and engagement with Ruby so this means a lot.
  - omneity 1y ago
    You and I and many others, a true legend!
zem 1y ago
looks neat, and definitely in the spiritual tradition of shoes! how does deployment work? can this be used to ship apps where the end user doesn't need to be aware of hokusai or ruby?
- zero-st4rs 1y ago
  This is a great question that I don't yet have an answer for. Ideally, there should be an automated way builtin to the gem that packages apps. Currently, I use a tool I wrote called Barista to package an an application with it's dependencies, (part of it was modeled after chef/omnibus). This might not be the best way though, so I'm open to ideas.
talljohnson1234 1y ago
This looks really good.

92 points by zero-st4rs 1y ago

whalesalad 1y ago

How would you compare this to RubyMotion?

zero-st4rs 1y ago
Great question. From what I understand of RubyMotion, it compiles directly to native, calling into Objective C APIs, and like DragonRuby the Ruby implementation is not MRI. Since Hokusai uses MRI, one can pull in from that ecosystem of gems. RubyMotion also appears to support (iOS, Android, OSX) whereas Hokusai intends to support OSX, Linux, and Windows. Implementation-wise, the framework itself seems different. Looking at the following [RubyMotion app](https://github.com/HipByte/RubyMotionSamples/tree/master/ios/CircleLayout/app https://github.com/HipByte/RubyMotionSamples/tree/master/ios...), the logic is spread out over separate files and it doesn't appear to have a templating language. On the other hand, Hokusai UI components are just a class that inherits from Hokusai::Block, and are self contained blocks that can be stitched together. Hokusai is more like Vue Single file components in this regard. Hokusai also doesn't make a distinction between a "component" and an "app", they are all just Blocks. Does that answer your question?

iraliaf 1y ago

this is really cool, thanks for contributing to the ruby ecosystem!! Do you have any example sites? I couldn't find a reference on your overview

zero-st4rs 1y ago
Yup! https://hokusai.skinnyjames.net https://hokusai.skinnyjames.net has a guide with screenshots. The repo itself has more examples.

dismalaf 1y ago

Looks really cool. Just a curiosity though, why xmake instead of rake?

zero-st4rs 1y ago
Good question! Most of the development build fetches and compiles C dependencies. xmake happens to be really good at this, especially considering xmake-repo. Rake tasks don't have builtins for this iirc.

az09mugen 1y ago

Very cool project, and well thought with the choice of Raylib or SDL2. But since Raylib can compile to Android (https://github.com/raysan5/raylib/blob/master/examples/Makefile.Android https://github.com/raysan5/raylib/blob/master/examples/Makef...), do you think it could be difficult to add Android as a target platform ?

zero-st4rs 1y ago
Interesting, for sure. I don't know much about Ruby on android (the resulting application will absolutely need a ruby interpreter) but I thought Windows would be a no-op and I got it working there, so who knows? :)
- az09mugen 1y ago
  Ahah nice, I will definitively craft some GUIs for fun with your lib and make you some feedback. Thanks for this project !

samiv 1y ago

Cool.. I guess but I just wonder.. is writing the UIs in code an actual practice that people do these days? I program (mostly) in C++ using Qt for my UIs and I just use the Qt Designer to visually drag and drop to build my UIs and the actual code gets generated by the tool. Fast and simple.

zero-st4rs 1y ago
Pretty cool! I've heard a lot of good things about Qt.
sunrunner 1y ago
As an end user, what's the licensing situation like with Qt? I was looking to build a cross-platform desktop application (down the rabbit hole...) and was frustrated with the number of options that were just a web view of some sort and some bindings to a JS/TS framework of your choice (I don't have one and don't really want to have to use one or bundle it with the application). Qt looked interesting, particularly with the concise syntax afforted by QML and QtQuick, but the licensing was off-putting and even just getting access (for a non-commercial project for example) seemed to require an awkward sign-up and some kind of installer. I crave the conciseness and simplicity of something like SwiftUI but the options for doing that in a cross-platform way seem limited.
- samiv 1y ago
  It's double licensed. The Qt Company offers both a commercial and LGPL license but they do their best to bury and hide the LGPL option and use dark patterns to try to trick one to get the commercial license. They also want to push you towards getting an account with them for the installer. That being said the packages (without online installer) are also available for direct download when you know where to look... [see link below] If you're on Linux though the situation is much simpler since your distribution most likely already packages the Qt libs so you just use your package manager to install them and off you go... Regardless, for anyone looking for a native portable toolkit, I don't really think there's anything that comes close to Qt in terms of functionality and tooling (like Qt Creator and Qt Designer) and once you get over the idiosyncrasies and quirks its really quite good (for the most part). https://download.qt.io/official_releases/qt/ https://download.qt.io/official_releases/qt/

xfalcox 1y ago

This looks super cool, exactly what I've been wanting to create some useful widgets! Thanks for sharing!

zero-st4rs 1y ago
Thanks! I'm really interested to hear how it "plays" for people. Would love updates if you use it.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

jenadine 1y ago

First time I hear about "copyfarleft license". I wonder what that means in practice for such a library.

zero-st4rs 1y ago
Thanks for raising this question. From the discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43938309 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43938309, it probably won't stay PPL for much longer. It just needs to be worked out.

viraptor 1y ago

Could you add some information about licence? Currently I don't know what is it compatible with and it's not listed on OSI. So unless someone's up for reading lots of legalese, it's not easy to use/publish.

maxmcd 1y ago
https://ball.disco.coop/Peer_Production_License https://ball.disco.coop/Peer_Production_License
- viraptor 1y ago
  Yeah, this still doesn't answer: can I use this with agpl, gpl, lgpl, apache2, others. The summary on top seems to imply that it's not AGPL/GPL compatible since it talks about granting specific types of organisations some monetization privileges. It doesn't simplify what the rules are (what qualifies as use?), without having to read the licence itself. On the first read it's basically: compatible with BSD-like and PPL... and not much else? It actually seems to break the licensing itself - the colorize gem is GPL2, which seems not compatible with PPL. https://github.com/fazibear/colorize/blob/master/LICENSE https://github.com/fazibear/colorize/blob/master/LICENSE https://codeberg.org/skinnyjames/hokusai/src/commit/5380728dd8e6c092b0d2573f9caf07d190891a65/hokusai.gemspec#L19 https://codeberg.org/skinnyjames/hokusai/src/commit/5380728d...
  - zero-st4rs 1y ago
    Yeah, the main thing I understand about PPL is that it behaves like the GPL license, but has provisions for worker owned cooperatives or non-profits. 4.c. (Looking at the information again around this license, I suspect I may be incorrect though) And you are correct, including colorize does break GPL2, I'm surprised I missed that. Any lawyers out there? :)
    - kirushik 1y ago
      Disclaimer: I am not a legal professional (in any jurisdiction), and this is not any form of an official advice. But I've happened to work as "engineer in licensing and copy activation" for one of the major FOSS vendors, and then being a licensing compliance officer in another large-ish FOSS project; and here are my 2¢: You are indeed in violation of GPL2 when building on top of GPL2-licensed code and giving it a non-compatible license. And PPL is explicitly non-compatible, since it restricts the "four freedoms of FOSS" for some actors (as despicable as they might be), while GPL is explicitly restricting any form of judgement when providing the four freedoms. On a more general note — I appreciate the spirit and the intention behind your licensing choice, but unfortunately in practice this would mean severe impediment for hokusai adoption. Like, it would be technically hard/impossible to include hokusai and derived works into any software packets distribution: they both technically and by policy are usually restricted to "clear, well-known licenses" (which typically means OSI/FSF-recognized ones), and it might not even be possible to express your licensing choice when putting the code up there. And who would pick a GUI toolkit to build with, when the resulting code can't even be published in the package repos of their Linux distro of choice? On a more fundamental level (and I start feeling out of my depth here a little bit) — Creative Commons licenses and their derivatives are usually not a great fit for software code. Eg right here in the comments someone already mentioned that it's not clear what constitutes "use" of your codebase — and indeed, the text of your license mostly focuses on Reproduction, Distribution and Adaptation. If I build and html-based webapp on hokusai, run it on my own server, and you open the page — is this Distribution or Reproduction, for whom of us? Even worse, if hokusai is being used in a startup which assigned shares (not options) to its founding engineers, but not to everyone — is it a "worker-owned business" or not? What about an exploitive business which frames itself as a coop/NGO/whatever, but frames it actual workers as contractors (Uber-style)? Legally it might pass the benchmark outlined in PPL, but in practice it might be even more exploitative than just hiring someone at the labor market rates. Same with an org which exploits unpaid interns or volunteers...

omneity 1y ago

This is reminding me a lot of shoes.rb (in a good way) Awesome work!

zero-st4rs 1y ago
Thanks! _why is the person who really sparked my love and engagement with Ruby so this means a lot.
- omneity 1y ago
  You and I and many others, a true legend!

zem 1y ago

looks neat, and definitely in the spiritual tradition of shoes! how does deployment work? can this be used to ship apps where the end user doesn't need to be aware of hokusai or ruby?

zero-st4rs 1y ago
This is a great question that I don't yet have an answer for. Ideally, there should be an automated way builtin to the gem that packages apps. Currently, I use a tool I wrote called Barista to package an an application with it's dependencies, (part of it was modeled after chef/omnibus). This might not be the best way though, so I'm open to ideas.

talljohnson1234 1y ago

This looks really good.