ghivert / proton

Ruby + Electron = <3

Proton — Ruby Electron — Desktop app using Ruby and Node!

Ruby Electron is an experimental work. As an open source project, it should provide a full port of Electron, the perfect web desktop app framework. Some parts are currently working, but everything needs more work. As time is passing, more and more features will be added, and examples will be provided in the future. They can be found here.

Right now, Proton can be bundled as a gem, but is not purposefully. It is still at a really early stage, and eveything can change or break previous code at any moment. When stable, Proton will be released on RubyGems.

How does it work ?

Ruby Electron makes its magic with help of Node.js and Opal. Opal is a transpiler from Ruby to JavaScript. It has few limitations like non mutable string. Otherwise it provides a full transpiler. More details can be found on the page of the project. Providing Electron to Ruby users, Proton makes extensive use of Electron, by providing a Ruby-like library.

How to compile ?

git clone https://github.com/ghivert/proton.git
cd proton
gem build proton.gemspec
gem install ./proton-0.1.0.gem

How can I use it ?

Once you cloned and locally installed the gem, you can simple use proton main.rb on a correct file (see the examples or sources). Everything is automated to give the perfect Proton experience !

Remarks ?

PR ? Contributing ?

PR are welcome. :) You can else mail me, or come and contribute if you like the project and want to help ! Any help is welcome, even docs !

Tests

"Hey guy, you're not writing tests!" I know. Proton is mainly a POC as for now, and shouldn't be used into production. If the project goes on, Spectron will probably be used.

Issues

Any issues ? Let me know, I'll fix it as soon as I can !

Licence

MIT Licence. Enjoy the work.

Why ?

Because it's both fun and useful. Electron rocks. Ruby rocks.

Ruby + Electron = <3

Support on Beerpay

Hey dude! Help me out for a couple of 🍻!

proton's Issues

[Question]: Future Plans for Proton and Contributions

Hello there!

I am really liking the overall idea of Proton, and I personally think if could offer a decent Ruby framework to create desktop apps. The only issue right now is that is only setup to only create the main.js starting the main process for Electron. Do you have any plans or ideas to handle the app-side of Proton?

I can see you use Opal for the Electron side, but surely not the best idea for the app itself. Of course since Proton doesn't touch that side of the app, someone could use whatever they want, like CoffeeScript 2 which brings JSX to the Ruby ring. Have you considered creating a development environment to help users write Ruby code for the app/renderer side without having to stop and compile with every change? (e.g. Using Rails to watch and recompile changes after saves). Also what about offering a default vanilla main.rb file, since users have to rely on the example apps? I really think adding things like this would certainly give Ruby devs the same benefits a JS dev would have natively.

I'm setting up a dev webpacker/coffeescript/sass environment for one of my own projects, and if you would like Proton to offer something like this I certainly don't mind sending an example, or even a PR to add some capability.

Anyways, I thought I would ask, and certainly plan to start sending code/doc PRs your way if you are still active, as I really believe this project has potential.

Readme wrong link

The opalrb link in readme is not links to the original website for Opal ruby in browser.
Original link: https://opalrb.com/
Link in Readme: https://opalrb.org

testing electron with rspec

So I need to create a test framework to test an electron app...I was thinking of using rspec and connecting to electron with a headless driver like phantomJS or something of that nature. Do you have any advice or any github pages you can send me too?

Printing a variable

How can i do print a ruby variable ?