libui-node

libui is a simple and portable (but not inflexible) GUI library in C that uses the native GUI technologies of each platform it supports.

It is in early stage of development, but is evolving at great pace and is really awesome.

It could become an awesome, lightweight alternative to Electron to develop multiplatform GUI.

Supported platform

• Windows: Windows Vista SP2 with Platform Update or newer
• Unix: GTK+ 3.10 or newer
• Mac OS X: OS X 10.8 or newer

Project status

• All current libui API, except forthese ones are implemented.
• I’m developing on linux , so this is the preferred platform to test. OSX should work too, but it’s not tested. Windows has yet to be configured in build scripts, but it will be supported in further releases.
• There are very few tests developed, but they are passing in Travis thank you to @jjrv awesome work.
• This is not yet battle-tested in a real app, but the control gallery example you saw in the screenshot above is fully working.

Build Requirements

• All platforms:
  • CMake 2.8.11 or newer
• Windows: either -Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 or newer (2013 is needed for va_copy()) -MinGW-w64 (other flavors of MinGW may not work)
• Unix: nothing else specific
• Mac OS X: nothing else specific, so long as you can build Cocoa programs

Installation

We don’t publish new versions to NPM yet.

git clone npm install

To run the control gallery example, type:

npm start

Usage

Plase look inexamples folder. We will write complete API documentation soon…

Future directions of the project

API

This binding is actually implementing low-level API straight to the libui ones. We plan to add another level of API on top of it to simplify GUI building. You can get a taste of how they will be in example utils.js file .

This new API will support transpilation from JSX to further simplify GUI building.

These works will become in future the base for a React-Native like project.

Publishing

Since libui binaries are relatively small, we plan to precompile them for supported platforms and publish binaries file directly to NPM, to avoid the native build stage on install.

Contribution & design

• Each libui widget implementaion is written in it’s own C++ file in src folder.
• Each widget is implemented in it’s own C++ class, each class is a simple wrapper for related libui C functions.
• There is an header file called ui-node.h that contains all classes definitions.
• We build the project using the awesomenbind tool, that automate the process of linking a straight C++ class to Node.js stuff…
• All the GUI code run in the node javascript main thread. You must call libui.startLoop to start the GUI event loop. It run one step at a time, you can see inindex.js how this is implemented.

Useful NPM scripts

• test – run AVA tests && XO linting.
• start – start the control gallery example
• build – rebuild C++ sources
• build:libui – rebuild libui sources under libui git submodule

Related projects

• libui – Simple and portable (but not inflexible) GUI library in C that uses the native GUI technologies of each platform it supports.
• nbind – Magical headers that make your C++ library accessible from JavaScript

Contributors

Andrea Parodi	Juha Järvi	Chan Guan Hao

License

The MIT License (MIT)

Copyright (c) 2016 parro-it