/Blink.jl

Web-based GUIs for Julia

Primary LanguageJuliaOtherNOASSERTION

Blink.jl

Build Status

Blink.jl is the Julia wrapper around Electron. It can serve HTML content in a local window, and allows for communication between Julia and the web page. In this way, therefore, Blink can be used as a GUI toolkit for building HTML-based applications for the desktop.

To install, do:

Pkg.add("Blink")
Blink.AtomShell.install()

Basic usage:

julia> Pkg.add("Blink")
# ... Blink builds and downloads Electron ...

julia> using Blink

julia> w = Window() # Open a new window
Blink.AtomShell.Window(...)

julia> body!(w, "Hello World") # Set the body content

julia> loadurl(w, "http://julialang.org") # Load a web page

For options see the functions defined in window.jl, which closely follow electron's API.

You can also use the JS API to interact with the window. For example:

julia> @js w Math.log(10)
2.302585092994046

If that's not convincing enough, open the console (Cmd-Alt-I on OS X) and evaluate:

@js w console.log("hello, web-scale world")

Issues & Caveats

  • On Windows, the spawned process dumps its output into Julia's STDOUT, which is kind of annoying.