Vision (and the blog)

This is mainly about what to expect here and specifically from the blog part.

So first of all, I am not very good at writing, especially not in english but it's probably a good idea to create some channel for people who are interested in the project so I can post here some updates and important changes.

It's also probably a good place to provide some context & background info on some decision I've made, explain some problems I've been facing and in overall pretty much anything I'd like to say but what is not a good fit for the main page.

The project started almost year ago and I still think it's something useful and something I enjoy wasting time on so if you are looking for a javascript GUI lib for your next desktop/embedded application then you might consider checking this site from time to time or maybe even following me on the twitter if you're that kind of people.

It's still not production-ready and it will take a lot of time to get some features done (accessibility, text-layout for non-latin languages) and even then it will never truly feel like a native app but I believe that it doesn't matter for some kind of applications, especially not for the embedded ones.

So what is this about? What is the idea or my vision? Simply put, I want to do native/embedded applications using the web technologies. I mean, I am doing web applications for my whole life so naturally I want to reuse the knowledge and the tooling I already have. So this is a bit like electron except that there's no browser engine anywhere. Some APIs are (intentionally) similar but it's not and never will be another web target.

However, it hopefully will become another target for your favourite web framework of choice. I want to use vue, react maybe even svelte and if possible, even with some already existing UI library for the respective framework (it's a long run but it's something I'd definitely like to have). I don't expect being able to use any existing library, that would be too hard but some of them should be possible.

Which brings me to the status of this project, currently the development is hapenning mostly from me but it is meant to be community project. I am currently trying to make it more readable so you or anybody else could join us. The other developer which is helping me is Simon Korzunov.

After the cleanup, I want to finish some feature parity with react-native, and then it might be possible (to some degree) take your existing RN app and run it on your desktop or maybe even some raspi attached to the TV. I think that would be really nice achievement for the first stable version.

That said, react-native is not a primary target, it just happenned to be easy enough. Next milestones will focus more on other frameworks. And maybe we could extract RN part to its own repo but for now I want to keep it here. I hope it explains a bit why it is currently both "web-like" library and also RN implementation at the same time (which might feel a bit weird).