tkoolen/Blink.jl

Web-based GUIs for Julia

Blink.jl

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:

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

Dependencies

• 7z on Windows and unzip on Linux.
  • You'll need to install the appropriate one for your system to be able to install Electron (for Linux, apt get install -y unzip or similar should work).
  • 7z is also packaged with Julia, so if you have your Julia installation in your PATH, we can use that version of 7z as well.

Basic usage:

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.

• When running on a headless linux instance (such as for CI tests), you must start julia via xvfb-run julia. More information can be found in the electron docs here. See the Blink.jl .travis.yml file for an example.

  Otherwise you will see the following error:

  │    LoadError: IOError: connect: connection refused (ECONNREFUSED)