Gluon
Develop desktop apps from websites, using system installed browsers and NodeJS.
Quick Start GitHub DiscordOpen Window API
Opening a Window in Gluon is as simple as one function call, with more options available if you need them like window size or loading extra code.
index.js
import * as Gluon from '@gluon-framework/gluon';
const Window = await Gluon.open('');
IPC API
IPC (Inter-Process Communication) allows you to communicate between your Node backend and website frontend.
Gluon has an easy but powerful asynchronous IPC API, which is also near-identical in Node and the exposed Gluon web API to allow even easier and quicker development.
It also has multiple versatile sub-APIs for doing common things, wrapping the base API so most developers won’t need to use a needlessly complex event-based system:
Expose
Easily expose Node functions to Web.
Store
Share common data effortlessly between Node and Web both ways.
node.js
// In your Node backend
import * as Gluon from '@gluon-framework/gluon';
const Window = await Gluon.open('');
Window.ipc.store.config = {
env: 'production'
};
import { writeFile } from 'fs/promises';
let log = '';
Window.ipc.log = msg => { // Log data to a log file on disk
log += msg;
writeFile('app.log', log); // Write to log file
};
site.js
// In your website's JS
// Get data from IPC Store
const { env } = await Gluon.ipc.store.config;
env // 'production'
// Call exposed IPC function
Gluon.ipc.log('Stored to log file!');
Idle API Experimental
The Idle API is a unique feature to Gluon, allowing you to “hibernate” or “sleep” Gluon windows to save system resources.
Hibernation fully kills the browser internally (using ~30MB of memory), whilst sleep uses a screenshot of the page as a placeholder (using ~60MB of memory).
You can either hibernate, sleep, and wake up manually with the API, or use automatic idle management which will hibernate the window when minimized for a chosen period of time, and wake it up when it’s focused again for you.
index.js
// In your Node backend
import * as Gluon from '@gluon-framework/gluon';
const Window = await Gluon.open('https://example.com');
const sleep = ms => new Promise(resolve => setTimeout(resolve, ms));
await sleep(5000); // Wait for the window to fully load
Window.idle.hibernate(); // Hibernate the window
await sleep(5000);
Window.idle.wake(); // Wake up the window
await sleep(5000);
Window.idle.sleep(); // Put the window to sleep
await sleep(5000);
Window.idle.wake(); // Wake it up again
