On Thursday, 21 December 2023 at 11:55:50 UTC, aberba wrote:
I have this idea of building a web view based desktop app with a webserver and db backend for CRUD functionality. This looks like a great option.
Yeah, it is a solid choice with a long history. Did you know the Unix Printing System used to (I don't think it still does but im not sure) work this way? Some 15 years ago, it'd start up a local web server and you'd work with it through the browser.
I do kinda wish that the common browsers supported connecting through a local unix socket, so you wouldn't have to allocate a port... but you don't really have to allocate a port anyway - you can let the OS give you a random available one then you see what it assigned you and pop open the browser. So it still works.
Another interesting thing available nowadays is some programs will run a webview ui but also open a websocket server, allowing other websites to interact with it. With a websocket server, any random internet page is allowed to try to connect to it - yes, normal javascript is allowed to try to connect a websocket to localhost - and your server checks the `origin` header to see if it is a website you want to talk to.
The Discord desktop client uses this, for example, to let their official sites detect the local client and ask if you want to "open link in app" (which i kinda hate lol but it does) and also to communicate some special features to it, like a discord website can show who is currently speaking in the voice to display on your web streams. (I know this cuz i hooked into it to make my own thing lol).
But it is still a potential way to combine all these options for your users.
