Last year, I attended DDD North. There were a number of interesting talks and I keep meaning to quickly summarise a few of them.
I’ll start with Kevin Boyle’s presentation on using HTML5 to Build Desktop Software.
A growing number of software producers are now using HTML5 and CSS as the UI layer for their desktop applications. Notable examples include Adobe Brackets and Dropbox.
The most obvious way to harness HTML, is simply to embed a web browser control. Unfortunately, this gives the developer no control over the browser used to render the page. Instead, it will depend on the user’s personal setup. This means that you would need to support multiple browsers.
The Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) offers a potential solution to this problem. CEF is an open source project founded by Marshall Greenblatt in 2008 to develop a Web browser control based on the Google Chromium project. Essentially, the open source core of the Chrome web browser is repackaged as a library to enable you to include it in your own product. This means that if you use Chromium Embedded as your UI layer, a user does not need to have Chrome installed.
CEF supports a range of operating systems and programming languages.
If you are programming in .NET, you will need to install the CefSharp Nuget package. This provides the .NET bindings to CEF. Versions of this package are available for both Windows Forms and WCF applications.
Advantages of this approach include:
- The ability to reuse the same view for your desktop and web applications.
- HTML 5 and CSS have a far larger user base. Designers don’t have to ask a developer to change the styling.
- A vaster toolset and better availability of third-party libraries.
- Design time data.
Caveats: There is no Microsoft support for CEF. It is still fairly raw. CEF is written in C and C++, and you may find yourself needing to delve into the C++ code in order to fix problems.
CEF cannot be used for mobile applications. However, it takes a similar approach to PhoneGap or Cordova, so you could probably use these to target mobile devices.
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