7 ms·

Go + gxui: Rendering native app GUIs on any platform?

90 points by wakaflockafliz 11y ago

wakaflockafliz 11y ago
Please forgive me if the title isn't 100% accurate. After thinking about it, this possibility of combining both native and web view rendering seems like it could be an interesting approach for a wide variety of potential use-cases. Are there any nice tools out there for creating apps that render to both native + web?
- overlord_tm 11y ago
  Create HTML app and pack it in some kind of shell (chromium embeeded, atom shell, nodewebkit)?
- carlos22 11y ago
  GTK3 has a HTML5 backend: https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/stable/gtk-broadway.html https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/stable/gtk-broadway.html But i think you still need all the libs and stuff.
franciscop 11y ago
> "This is so figgin cool, I woke up my wife this morning and showed her. She had no idea what she was looking at, but I know she recognized it as figgin cool as I'd normally get punched for waking her that early on a Saturday."
jayfk 11y ago
404?
jalfresi 11y ago
I've not tried this but I thought I'd mention that I've been using the QT QML packages for building desktops apps and the results are amazing! https://github.com/go-qml/qml https://github.com/go-qml/qml Even better with the Material additions from here: https://github.com/papyros/qml-material https://github.com/papyros/qml-material Building Google Material themed apps easily with a Golang back end? Lovely! I really hope the Golang team are considering the QML package as part of the standard library in Go v2, it would an absolutely awesome GUI kit to have as standard!
- StavrosK 11y ago
  Any screenshots?
  - jpmonette 11y ago
    https://salt.bountysource.com/teams/papyros https://salt.bountysource.com/teams/papyros http://papyros.io/2014/11/20/introduction-and-initial-plans.html http://papyros.io/2014/11/20/introduction-and-initial-plans.... http://papyros.io/monthly-update/2015/02/05/monthly-status-update-1-15.html http://papyros.io/monthly-update/2015/02/05/monthly-status-u...
    - StavrosK 11y ago
      Very nice! How is the performance/feel?
- fla 11y ago
  Qt is an amazing framework which got many things right! The combo C++ QML QtQuick made my life so much easier for a cross-platform OSX/Win app. I was able to develop most of it on Linux, and it even looks nifty! What else can you wish ? :)
  - cm3 11y ago
    I also prefer Qt but starting with Qt4 it imposes a minimum memory overhead of 25MiB to 30MiB for even a simple single window application with nothing in it. QML is likely higher. I don't like Gtk3 but they don't have this particular disadvantage. It's too much overhead and I haven't found a fix.
    - fla 11y ago
      Yes that's one of the downside. Also, the binaries can get fat really quick. Especially when you link statically with some of the Qt components. I guess it's a fair trade-off when you target today's desktop systems. Otherwise, it might worth looking at Qt for Embedded Linux.
roel_v 11y ago
How is this a 'native app GUI'? It's only OpenGL as far as I can tell?
- laumars 11y ago
  OpenGL is native. I assume you're thinking of the native WIMP APIs such as Win32, Cocoa, and so forth. But OpenGL does run natively on the client OS - even if the widgets then have to be re-implemented.
  - imaginenore 11y ago
    If the widgets had to be reimplemented, they are not native by definition.
    - laumars 11y ago
      The widgets are running natively on the client. There's no interpretation / JIT layer between the two like with a web stack. All you're doing with OpenGL rather than Win32 is drawing your widgets to the graphics buffer directly rather than using Win32 libraries to draw the widgets. So, to go back to the original comment, it is a "native GUI" it's just not calling Microsoft or Apple's toolkit libraries. This might sound like nitpicking, but you also have to bare in mind that it's not always as simple as saying "You want to write a native app, use Win32 or Cocoa". Half the time developers are running wrappers around the toolkits such MVC, .NET and wrappers to allow non-C et al languages to call C libraries. And even if you do want to directly call the "native" OS libraries, often there's more than one to choose from, eg on Linux things gets pretty complicated as there's several toolkits available (GTK, Qt, Motif, etc) and then a multitude of version of many of those libraries. Granted this doesn't solve the "many standards" problem, but at least it's a single dependency that runs natively on the client and draws directly to the graphics buffer - which has got to be better than the plethora of other cross platform implementations out there.
      - jfb 11y ago
        I'm sorry, but that reading is in clear contravention of the well understood meaning of "native" in the context of a UI.
ctoth 11y ago
I was excited to see "native" UI -- which I read as using the specific OS APIs to create native controls. This instead seems to be taking the Kivy OpenGL controls approach. It looks very nifty and as though it took effort by some smart folks. I was only hoping for truly native controls so as to provide access to screen readers and other a11y solutions by default.
atomical 11y ago
It is truly ugly. I say that out of wishing that they had designed it differently.
innguest 11y ago
First of all, these are not OS-native to any OS I know. So it's not native GUI. "Native" refers to the OS, not to the hardware. Second, the GUI looks atrocious. What is wrong with designers nowadays that they think we live in a cartoonish world?

Please forgive me if the title isn't 100% accurate. After thinking about it, this possibility of combining both native and web view rendering seems like it could be an interesting approach for a wide variety of potential use-cases. Are there any nice tools out there for creating apps that render to both native + web?

overlord_tm 11y ago
Create HTML app and pack it in some kind of shell (chromium embeeded, atom shell, nodewebkit)?
carlos22 11y ago
GTK3 has a HTML5 backend: https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/stable/gtk-broadway.html https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/stable/gtk-broadway.html But i think you still need all the libs and stuff.

franciscop 11y ago

> "This is so figgin cool, I woke up my wife this morning and showed her. She had no idea what she was looking at, but I know she recognized it as figgin cool as I'd normally get punched for waking her that early on a Saturday."

jayfk 11y ago

404?

jalfresi 11y ago

I've not tried this but I thought I'd mention that I've been using the QT QML packages for building desktops apps and the results are amazing! https://github.com/go-qml/qml https://github.com/go-qml/qml Even better with the Material additions from here: https://github.com/papyros/qml-material https://github.com/papyros/qml-material Building Google Material themed apps easily with a Golang back end? Lovely! I really hope the Golang team are considering the QML package as part of the standard library in Go v2, it would an absolutely awesome GUI kit to have as standard!

StavrosK 11y ago
Any screenshots?
- jpmonette 11y ago
  https://salt.bountysource.com/teams/papyros https://salt.bountysource.com/teams/papyros http://papyros.io/2014/11/20/introduction-and-initial-plans.html http://papyros.io/2014/11/20/introduction-and-initial-plans.... http://papyros.io/monthly-update/2015/02/05/monthly-status-update-1-15.html http://papyros.io/monthly-update/2015/02/05/monthly-status-u...
  - StavrosK 11y ago
    Very nice! How is the performance/feel?
fla 11y ago
Qt is an amazing framework which got many things right! The combo C++ QML QtQuick made my life so much easier for a cross-platform OSX/Win app. I was able to develop most of it on Linux, and it even looks nifty! What else can you wish ? :)
- cm3 11y ago
  I also prefer Qt but starting with Qt4 it imposes a minimum memory overhead of 25MiB to 30MiB for even a simple single window application with nothing in it. QML is likely higher. I don't like Gtk3 but they don't have this particular disadvantage. It's too much overhead and I haven't found a fix.
  - fla 11y ago
    Yes that's one of the downside. Also, the binaries can get fat really quick. Especially when you link statically with some of the Qt components. I guess it's a fair trade-off when you target today's desktop systems. Otherwise, it might worth looking at Qt for Embedded Linux.

roel_v 11y ago

How is this a 'native app GUI'? It's only OpenGL as far as I can tell?

laumars 11y ago
OpenGL is native. I assume you're thinking of the native WIMP APIs such as Win32, Cocoa, and so forth. But OpenGL does run natively on the client OS - even if the widgets then have to be re-implemented.
- imaginenore 11y ago
  If the widgets had to be reimplemented, they are not native by definition.
  - laumars 11y ago
    The widgets are running natively on the client. There's no interpretation / JIT layer between the two like with a web stack. All you're doing with OpenGL rather than Win32 is drawing your widgets to the graphics buffer directly rather than using Win32 libraries to draw the widgets. So, to go back to the original comment, it is a "native GUI" it's just not calling Microsoft or Apple's toolkit libraries. This might sound like nitpicking, but you also have to bare in mind that it's not always as simple as saying "You want to write a native app, use Win32 or Cocoa". Half the time developers are running wrappers around the toolkits such MVC, .NET and wrappers to allow non-C et al languages to call C libraries. And even if you do want to directly call the "native" OS libraries, often there's more than one to choose from, eg on Linux things gets pretty complicated as there's several toolkits available (GTK, Qt, Motif, etc) and then a multitude of version of many of those libraries. Granted this doesn't solve the "many standards" problem, but at least it's a single dependency that runs natively on the client and draws directly to the graphics buffer - which has got to be better than the plethora of other cross platform implementations out there.
    - jfb 11y ago
      I'm sorry, but that reading is in clear contravention of the well understood meaning of "native" in the context of a UI.

ctoth 11y ago

I was excited to see "native" UI -- which I read as using the specific OS APIs to create native controls. This instead seems to be taking the Kivy OpenGL controls approach. It looks very nifty and as though it took effort by some smart folks. I was only hoping for truly native controls so as to provide access to screen readers and other a11y solutions by default.

atomical 11y ago

It is truly ugly. I say that out of wishing that they had designed it differently.

innguest 11y ago

First of all, these are not OS-native to any OS I know. So it's not native GUI. "Native" refers to the OS, not to the hardware. Second, the GUI looks atrocious. What is wrong with designers nowadays that they think we live in a cartoonish world?