WebApp

In the pursuit of making a gui toolkit for node and in a goal to better learn how to make node bindings, I present my first node extension, WebApp.

This is very much a work in progress and I'm not even sure if it will stay active.

Goals

Give node developers a way to have a desktop GUI to their node servers using HTML5 + CSS3 as the GUI platform.

Implementation Details

Currently I'm using webkitgtk since it comes with my linux desktop and is easy to bind to.

TODOS

• Share the event loop between GTK's GLib and Node's libev. Tim Smart's node-gtk binding seems to implement this.
• Provide a way for the JavaScript in the webview talk to the JavaScript in node.
  • Maybe they should share a context, maybe not. Sharing a context would require replacing the JavaScriptCore in the webview with node's V8 instance.
  • Sharing a context could prove very dangerous.
  • How about instead, we simply provide two-way messaging. Though that could also expose nasty security holes.
• Provide a way for node to populate the content of the webview. This may be a local http server or some other means.