Guess what these tools can do for your web apps
Intrigued? Good. I came across Tauri, the first link below and thought that it looked promising as an alternative to Electron as a way to bring your web apps to the desktop. Then I just happened to find Wails which claims to do the same thing, so I took it as a sign to send these out to you.
Tauri
Tauri is a toolchain for building highly secure native apps that have tiny binaries and are very fast. Whether coming from the front-end with Gatsby, Yew, Svelte, Vue, Angular or React - Tauri solves the hard problems of safe User Interfaces for all the desktop platforms. Tauri uses Rust for wiring up your web application with platform native web rendering (eg. WebView, Edge). It claims to yield executables that are both smaller and more memory efficient. Both are a good thing when you consider the beast that is an Electron app. Tauri is usable now, but their roadmap shows even better features to come.
Wails
Wails is similar to Tauri in that it is meant to build your web apps for use on the desktop. It even uses the same platform native web viewers concept. However, it is built with Go in mind. Specifically it allows you to write and embed a Go-based API for your app. At first glance, Wails feels a bit less polished, but if you are a Go developer, this could be a way to put a UI on your applications and make them available on the desktop.
primo
Primo isn’t a desktop app shell, but is a tool that piqued my interest. [It] is an all-in-one IDE, CMS, component library, and static site generator. That may sound like a lot, and I suppose it is. Basically you login (with GitHub) and build a site. You can create reusable components and even use Tailwind CSS! The idea is that as a developer you can go in and create the ‘bones’ of the site with templates and such and then someone else could add the content. Or you can add your own, but in any case, it allows you to build a site. The big plus over other site builders I’ve come across is that when you are done, it will dump the static version of your site into a GitHub repo which you can then publish wherever you’d like. Like Netlify.
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