becksclair / webui

Use any web browser as GUI, with your preferred language in the backend and HTML5 in the frontend, all in a lightweight portable lib.

WebUI v2.4.2

WebUI is not a web-server solution or a framework, but it allows you to use any web browser as a GUI, with your preferred language in the backend and HTML5 in the frontend. All in a lightweight portable lib.

Download

• Latest Stable Release
• Nightly Build

Contents

• Features
• Showcase
• UI & The Web Technologies
• Documentation
• Build
• Examples
• Wrappers
• Supported Web Browsers
• License

Features

• Portable (Needs only a web browser at runtime)
• One header file
• Lightweight (Few Kb library) & Small memory footprint
• Fast binary communication protocol
• Multi-platform & Multi-Browser
• Using private profile for safety

Showcase

This text editor is a lightweight and portable example written in C using WebUI as the GUI library.

UI & The Web Technologies

Borislav Stanimirov discusses using HTML5 in the web browser as GUI at the C++ Conference 2019 (YouTube).

Web application UI design is not just about how a product looks but how it works. Using web technologies in your UI makes your product modern and professional, And a well-designed web application will help you make a solid first impression on potential customers. Great web application design also assists you in nurturing leads and increasing conversions. In addition, it makes navigating and using your web app easier for your users.

Why Use Web Browsers?

Today's web browsers have everything a modern UI needs. Web browsers are very sophisticated and optimized. Therefore, using it as a GUI will be an excellent choice. While old legacy GUI lib is complex and outdated, a WebView-based app is still an option. However, a WebView needs a huge SDK to build and many dependencies to run, and it can only provide some features like a real web browser. That is why WebUI uses real web browsers to give you full features of comprehensive web technologies while keeping your software lightweight and portable.

How Does it Work?

Think of WebUI like a WebView controller, but instead of embedding the WebView controller in your program, which makes the final program big in size, and non-portable as it needs the WebView runtimes. Instead, by using WebUI, you use a tiny static/dynamic library to run any installed web browser and use it as GUI, which makes your program small, fast, and portable. All it needs is a web browser.

Runtime Dependencies Comparison

	WebView	Qt	WebUI
Runtime Dependencies on Windows	WebView2	QtCore, QtGui, QtWidgets	A Web Browser
Runtime Dependencies on Linux	GTK3, WebKitGTK	QtCore, QtGui, QtWidgets	A Web Browser
Runtime Dependencies on macOS	Cocoa, WebKit	QtCore, QtGui, QtWidgets	A Web Browser

Documentation

Note We are currently writing documentation.

• Online Documentation - C
• Online Documentation - C++

Build

• Windows

  # GCC
  mingw32-make
  
  # MSVC
  nmake

  Windows SSL/TLS (Optional)

  Download and install the OpenSSL pre-compiled binaries for Windows:

  • MSVC: x64 OpenSSL v3.1.3 or 32Bit. Please check this Wiki list for more info.
  • MinGW: Curl for Windows win OpenSSL

  # GCC
  mingw32-make WEBUI_USE_TLS=1 WEBUI_TLS_INCLUDE="C:\curl-xxx-xxx-mingw\curl-xxx-xxx-mingw\include" WEBUI_TLS_LIB="C:\curl-xxx-xxx-mingw\curl-xxx-xxx-mingw\lib"
  
  # MSVC
  nmake WEBUI_USE_TLS=1 WEBUI_TLS_INCLUDE="C:\Program Files\OpenSSL-xxx\include" WEBUI_TLS_LIB="C:\Program Files\OpenSSL-xxx\lib"

• Linux

  # GCC
  make
  
  # Clang
  make CC=clang

  Linux SSL/TLS (Optional)

  sudo apt update
  sudo apt install libssl-dev
  
  # GCC
  make WEBUI_USE_TLS=1
  
  # Clang
  make WEBUI_USE_TLS=1 CC=clang

• macOS

  make

  macOS SSL/TLS (Optional)

  brew install openssl
  make WEBUI_USE_TLS=1

Examples

• C
• C++

Wrappers

Language	Status	Link
Go	✔️	Go-WebUI
Nim	✔️	Nim-WebUI
Pascal	✔️	Pascal-WebUI
Python	✔️	Python-WebUI
Rust	not complete	Rust-WebUI
TypeScript / JavaScript	✔️	Deno-WebUI
V	✔️	V-WebUI
Zig	not complete	Zig-WebUI
Odin	not complete	Odin-WebUI

Supported Web Browsers

Browser	Windows	macOS	Linux
Mozilla Firefox	✔️	✔️	✔️
Google Chrome	✔️	✔️	✔️
Microsoft Edge	✔️	✔️	✔️
Chromium	✔️	✔️	✔️
Yandex	✔️	✔️	✔️
Brave	✔️	✔️	✔️
Vivaldi	✔️	✔️	✔️
Epic	✔️	✔️	not available
Apple Safari	not available	coming soon	not available
Opera	coming soon	coming soon	coming soon

License

Licensed under MIT License.

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