DeskGap is a framework for building cross-platform desktop apps with web technologies (JavaScript, HTML and CSS).
To enable native capabilities while keeping the size down, DeskGap bundles a Node.js runtime and leaves the HTML rendering to the operating system‘s webview.
- Mac OS X Yosemite (version 10.10) or later
- Windows 10 October 2018 Update (version 1809) or later
- Linux x86_64 with webkit2gtk installed, tested on:
- Ubuntu 18.04.2 with
libwebkit2gtk-4.0-37 2.22.6 - openSUSE Leap 15.0 with
libwebkit2gtk-4_0-37 2.20.2
- Ubuntu 18.04.2 with
npm install --save-dev deskgapThe DeskGap API Demos app shows some of the DeskGap features and APIs with interactive scripts.
| macOS | Windows | Linux | Source Code |
|---|---|---|---|
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GitHub |
To test DeskGap on field, squoosh is wrapped into a desktop app "Pym" with DeskGap and submitted to the app stores.
| macOS | Windows | Source Code |
|---|---|---|
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GitHub |
hello-deskgap/
├── package.json
├── index.js
└── index.html
package.json points to the app's entry file and provides the script that starts your app:
{
"name": "hello-deskgap",
"main": "index.js",
"scripts": {
"start": "deskgap ."
}
}index.js is the entry file that creates a window which will render an HTML page:
const { app, BrowserWindow } = require('deskgap');
app.once('ready', () => {
const win = new BrowserWindow();
win.loadFile('index.html');
});index.html is the page to render:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head><meta charset="utf-8" /><title>Hello DeskGap</title></head>
<body><h1>Hello DeskGap</h1></body>
</html>npm install --save-dev deskgapnpm startWhat’s the difference between DeskGap and Electron?
DeskGap is designed to be a more lightweight alternative to Electron. It does not bundle Chromium or any other web engines. Instead, the ability of rendering HTML pages comes from the webview provided by the operating system, specifically, WKWebView on macOS and Microsoft.Toolkit.Forms.UI.Controls.WebView on Windows.
DeskGap is at its early stage. The API is still quite limited compared to Electron. Many functionalities are under development and some of them will probably never be possible. See this and this for more information.
There are already similar attempts (electrino and Quark for instance) out there. What makes DeskGap different?
With a Node.js runtime bundled, DeskGap comes with support for npm packages and all the battle-tested native capabilities in Node.js such as fs, net, http. The price is a larger executable size (about 8 MB zipped and 20 MB unzipped).
Older Windows’ do not have a modern browser engine, only the one that powers Internet Explorer. Windows 10 1809 is the first version that provides a modern webview with enough functionalities for DeskGap to be possible.
To support Windows 7, app developers would have to face compatibility issues coming from as low as IE 8. I personally don’t have enough motivation and interest to do this, but pull requests are always welcome.
If you want to try DeskGap but dropping Windows 7 support is a no-go for your app, consider packaging the app with Electron for the unsupported platform. The DeskGap API is intentionally designed to be like Electron’s. The following code is a good start:
let appEngine;
try {
appEngine = require('deskgap');
}
catch (e) {
appEngine = require('electron');
}
const { app, BrowserWindow } = appEngine;Probably no. The DeskGap API is still quite limited. If you start building an app with DeskGap, getting it running on Electron may be easy, but not the other way around.