Replies: 96 comments 198 replies
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@ry and I recently talked about it, and we presented the intent at TSConf, but there was no issue for it. There was some conversation on Gitter recently as well. |
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very good |
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An Electron-ish thing built with Deno would be a big deal to me. I'd put a lot of effort into switching my apps to it, since the security improvements alone would be quite substantial. I suspect the resource efficiency would be much better, too, if Deno's startup time is anything to go by. |
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from scratch, I wanted to use at least webrender initially but I'm targetting raspberry pi and that only has opengl 2.1 |
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Also checkout https://github.com/webview/webview_deno |
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Check out https://webui.me/ |
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@anthonytietjen Yep that's already down below #3234 (comment) |
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This is my communication case using the combination of deno and tauri |
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@kitsonk Thanks, I didn't know about it. Having a full-blown browser bundled would be something absolutely perfect, if only the overhead is not prohibitively expensive - but since you are already considering it with Ryan then I guess that happily it isn't. Will what you were presenting with Ryan at TSConf about this be available online to watch? Or maybe it is already? It would be great if Servo could be used here. The tight coupling with SpiderMonkey seems like a problem, unless it would be used just as a completely separated frontend and communicate with the main Deno process with a WebSocket or something like that, maybe having Deno transpiling the frontend code from TS to JS on the fly. It is actually pretty interesting how it could be done - from GUI windows being just lightweight browsers, getting all assets via some proxy or file protocol and communicating via WebSockets with the Deno process, to having some duality like Electron, to having a browser part using the same engine or even the same process and event loop as the main Deno code. I wonder what is your and @ry's idea of what would be optimal here. |
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This is my communication case using the combination of deno and tauri |
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@sholladay Yeah, I am currently writing an app that needs a GUI which I am doing it in Electron but it is something that could be written in Deno with the current API with no problems if I could only do GUI with Deno (and unfortunately it cannot be a web app). I am concerned exactly with security of what I am doing right now, that the app will have full access to user's data, which could be nicely restricted with Deno. Not to mention the transpilation steps etc. |
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Having a built-in module which bundles a cross-platform webview implementation would be the killer-feature that would get me to start experimenting/migrating from node.js. |
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I have some basic feature requests. Few native dialogs. Alert, prompt, confirm and file/folder picker/save dialogs. Because sometimes you have app running in the background it will throw an error but user can't notice it so you have to show some dialog about what is going on and in Node.js there is no easy way to do that. |
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Ya’ll should have a chat with @nothingismagick and the other fine folks at Tauri: https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri/ A lot of what has been described here, they’re already working on or have already thought a great deal about. |
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This is my communication case using the combination of deno and tauri |
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@erlend-sh Are you sure this project is alive? The tauri.studio domain (from github.com/tauri-apps/tauri.studio) redirects to a domain parking page and on tauri-apps.org (the documentation link in the readme of github.com/tauri-apps/tauri) I get ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT:
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Yes - its alive. We're preparing our site to launch this month.
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Unfortunately Deno support is deep under the plans, not in 2021, and who knows when |
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@rsp - we've had so many moving parts that we couldn't justify publishing the docs about how to use tauri until we've got a stabilized API and build system. Feel free to drop by our discord server if you want some quick support about getting setup with it. On a sidenote, we do plan to release a deno CLI and rust integration once deno is stable enough for that too. |
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@nothingismagick Thanks for the info. The project after reading the readme looks almost too good to be true. Really looking forward to reading the docs when they are available. It's great to hear that you plan releasing a Deno CLI as well. |
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yeah - we just a comment from a svelte user today. they confirmed a final linux build size of ca 600KB. |
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But I know we can break the 500KB boundary for sure. Here's the discord if you want to stop in and have a chat: |
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It would be great if we remembered that this is a Deno issue tracker. 😄 |
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I would very much like to port my desktop environment to Deno, watching. |
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By "this" you mean all the features of deuteron? I agree that would ultimately be the right place, because with deno most people are going to be doing "deno upgrade" and if deuteron falls behind the main version too far then its going to break that model where they need multiple versions locally, and to be constantly worrying about having the right versions and compatibility, etc. If it was natively supported it would be much more likely to always be in sync and to have a more rapid adoption. It would be really cool to break down the individual features that would be required and see if they can't get added incrementally. I think you have at least 3 that I heard:
Maybe those can be broken down further? I think the deno team has been pretty gracious about accepting reasonably scoped PR's from outside teams. If it was broken down into small pr's, the sum of which added to this end result it could work. Local File StrategySo given that the local file webview requires a server, and it sort of seems like a given to me that many apps will want to have stand alone binaries which have all code/resource files bundled with it (not pulled from a url), it seems possibly like having an embedded webserver be part of the webview launch.... What would that look like? sequenceDiagram
Main->>+Server: launch 127.0.0.1:12345
Main->>Render: webview launches
Render-->>Server: http://127.0.0.1:12345/index.html
Server->>Main: file("./index.html")
Server->>Render: index.html
Render-->>Server: http://127.0.0.1:12345/main.ts
Server->>Main: downcompile("./main.ts")
Server->>Render: main.ts, application/javascript
Could that be driven from a runtime module? // main.ts
import { Application } from "https://deno.land/x/deuteron/mod.ts";
const app = new Application({
webviewUrl: "./index.html"
});
// todo: ipc handling here...
await app.run();This would sort of push the launching of the webview into a deno runtime api instead of a command line startup flag, such as maybe const window = Deno.webview(url); |
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@justinmchase Do you know how I can get more attention on them, or should I just give it some time? |
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Especially if stuff is easy to do, then the absolute easiest thing to do is to write a PR: I'll be happy to review and approve (when I have time) if the PR looks fine and a test is included :) |
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That would be great! As I said before I haven't contributed to Deno before, so please tell me when something is missing/wrong. Issue #17994 was a bit more complicated and I am also not 100% sure on what approach to take |
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I've been conversing in this chat hoping some others from this fairly large discussion thread would chime in but probably it would make sense to drive this forward into different discussions. Some would make sense on the project repo (imlementation deails) but it may make sense to start a new discussion here in this repo that is more of a specific proposal. I would probably recommend getting buy-in from the deno code owners before going too far because if you hit a road block with them, then it could be a lot of effort for nothing. So perhaps make a new discussion in this repo, and instead of discussing the possibility of a standard gui propose a more specific solution.
I feel like if you propose it as a solution and the team has a clear vision of how it could be progressed and the costs / benefits, you could get buy in and go from there. |
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Sounds good, I will look into it in the coming days (when I have time) |
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Just another idea: I found this project: https://github.com/oooutlk/tcltk - Rust bindings to Tcl/Tk commands |
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It was interesting |
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It was interesting content |
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@rsp have you seen this? It is written in pure-C, works like a dream. |
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The latest Deno webui wrapper seems stable now. |
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Did you send any image from backend to front by webui deno ? I did try everifyng and still cant do that :( |
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The binary send/receive gets updated and fixed in the C library, but not yet updated in the Deno wrapper. |
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...and this means that it is not suitable for Deno GUI desktop! |
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Yep, without Deno wrapper update it's not suitable for Deno GUI desktop |
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It's actually a TAR file, not ZIP. Use |
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with current FFI interface, we can use sdl2 to provide native gui for desktop application: |
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This is actually really cool. Could make indie games with it for sure. |
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can i bundle deno runtime to execute scripts from my electron app? |
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You certainly could do that in a child process but I'd be pretty surprised if you could have it run in-proc with node, I'd have to assume the two instances of v8 couldn't share threads but I'm not really sure. But if it was out of proc then it would work but would be fairly complicated, wouldn't be able to use it for UI and you have to have an extra communication channel to hop from render to main to child process. |
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I noticed that Deno already supports JSX/TSX, so maybe we could take advantage of that. By using a concept similar to ReactNative a full GUI-API could be built without the overhead of a browser instance. The implementation basically consists of React/Preact (Preact already works with Deno/Fresh), Yoga-Layout (C/C++ implementation of modern CSS Layout) and bindings to platform-native ui components (already existing for Windows, Mac (ReactNative Desktop), Android and iOS (ReactNative)). This solution would preserve the speed of Deno and could be (if it's not too big) included by default (providing an alternative version without GUI support for server-side applications like Deno Deploy). The API should be designed in a way which allows code to be shared with Fresh. Although the discussion focusses on desktop, this paves the way for mobile development. Those who wish to use HTML/CSS could use a Webview/Iframe (Chromium loaded on-demand; automatically downloaded if needed and not already installed (on Windows the Edge installation could be used)). |
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I like JSX/TSX, but please let's not bind ourself to React. Just wanting to point this out, not saying that you implied this. |
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It is maybe 30 minutes of work to setup a project that offers all of this functionality soup @hansSchall is mentioning, so regardless of the intention or not I don't understand request like these. Deno is doing very good things like KV / watch / cron / docs etc.. THOSE are the tools I want them to keep building - we don't need them writing simple glue code for us regardless of the framework. |
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Here I made a demo compilable deno server runs frontend in a chrome window: https://github.com/galaxydo/deno-chrome-app |
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When you propose to run Deno UI in webview or something like that. It does not work great when you e.g. need only alert/confirm/prompt dialogs... it also does not include tray icon access... also custom dialogs like folder picker, file picker would be great. Being able to show these without rendering webpage first would be cool. Also webview has usually problem with multi-monitor setup. I personally used NodeJS to create plugin for Photoshop because those plugins are in JS... so makes sense I can share code between external and internal proces. So the use case is not always server only. |
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Deno with a official gui module that can start a webview like tauri does would change the world 4 sure. Tauri is great. I have used it for several apps and i like it a lot. Getting a web view window up and running from one file and i'm trying out webui at the moment. webui if Deno could get a webui, we could be able to call backend functions directly in the frontend. |
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@svefro |
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Yes but i have run in to a few problems and limitations. Maybe what webui lacks, can be done with other modules, but i have not gotten there yet. Anyway, Deno should have Standard GUI module so apps like the one below could be made without to much hassle. Screenshot of one of the apps i have made with Tauri (Running on Kubuntu here):
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Deno-WebUI is very lightweight and totally portable. |
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Deno-Webui is work for me now! Even binary transfer by sendRaw() (looks for 2.5.3+ version) |
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ElectronJS should be possible! |
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ElctronJS is for Node.js |
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I created a project called Node PS1 for .NET, which allows Node.js, Deno, and Bun to call PowerShell 5.1 via IPC, enabling them to interact with WinForms, WPF, and WebView2. I plan to develop a similar project for GNOME JavaScript in the future, and also intend to create a cross-platform WebView project based on the previous two projects. |
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What is the list of dependencies the end-user needs to install before running a project based on |
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Project Dependencies List
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My new project: |
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I think blitz is a worthwhile option to consider; it's a pure HTML/CSS rendering engine. We only need to build a DOM API according to web standards, and then use Blitz to render the DOM structure into the window to get a web-compliant GUI. It's also easy to use without requiring a significant learning curve. Furthermore, Deno currently supports JSX, which makes running React and Vue very simple. This is more controllable in terms of compatibility than WebView, more convenient than WebUI which relies on browser access, and more lightweight than Electron. Although Blitz currently. |
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The most robust layout engine is certainly important for the wider web, where there are an infinite number of pages of varying quality created at different times, but for local GUIs it is quite enough if the renderer is at least at the level of common GUI layout engines and can be controlled from the outside, which real browsers or webviews are not at all. |
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Yes, that's precisely why I mentioned Blitz. Embedding an excessively large browser into Deno would result in an unimaginably large executable file for our GUI program, whereas a simple HTML/CSS rendering engine wouldn't reach such a terrifying size. But perhaps Deno's approach to GUI support is more about quality over quantity. |
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I generally agree, but the problem is that Deno is a JS/TS runtime, so I don't think it makes sense to include another JS/TS runtime which real browser or webview certainly is if you don't want to separete your GUI code from the "startup" code. |
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Someone who only needs a button, some text, a few images, and colors will definitely agree with you. But as soon as we start talking about complex web applications that involve 3D rendering, advanced networking, WebSocket communication, encrypted HTTPS requests, and more, some of these things can be handled by Deno itself, but others cannot. For those, we definitely need a web browser. As mentioned, a web browser is necessary for complex web applications. However, embedding a full browser can result in a huge executable size as @jerry4718 said. That's where using a WebView runtime or WebUI's real browser mode can solve the problem by keeping the executable size small while still supporting complex web applications. |
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@AlbertShown complex local applications has totaly different options than a web app, as they can include anything needed in the form of Deno FFI/Native plugins in Rust which web apps simply can't... |
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Has there been any discussion about having a standard way of doing GUI in Deno? I don't necessarily mean that it all has to be in the core or std modules, and I don't mean anything complicated or very high-level, just something that lets us open native windows, show dialogs and generally create GUI apps using just JS/TS.
In issue #1629 about WebGL from January (the only issue related to GUI that I've found) @ry you said that you want to support WebGL in core eventually. If it is possible to open a native window and draw using WebGL then it will be possible to use it to create a GUI framework as a third party module, but thinking about it I started wondering about a Web way to do GUIs, which is really HTML. I'm not arguing that it is the best way but this is certainly the most Web-style way. And since one of the goals of Deno is to have a similar API for the things that people are used to in browsers, then it seems like something worth thinking about.
If Deno doesn't use a Web way of creating GUIs then soon it will have to reinvent HTML and CSS, plus some logic of dispatching the click events etc. and it will soon get quite complicated.
If, on the other hand, Deno is able to open a window with HTML even with very limited functionality (like only text and canvas, for example), then it will be relatively easier to not go too far away from what people are used to in the browsers.
Of course having something like Electron bundled in Deno might be a little overkill (or maybe not? any thoughts on that?), but having a possibility to write an Electron-like framework as a third-party module without producing a separate Deno binary to be able to do that, would be something to think about.
Running
deno run https://www.example.com/gui-example.tsto start a GUI program, instead ofdeno-electron-like-fork run https://www.example.com/gui-example.tswould be something to consider.I wonder if there has already been any discussion about it.
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