Use Tauri or Neutralino as a lightweight (non-bloat) alternative to electron

[yeus]

Electron packages the complete node.js environemnt and a chrome browser. This makes SW built on electron quiet big. Some projects emerged that want to help out on this regard.

Look at this blogpost:

https://blog.logrocket.com/why-use-electron-alternative/

or this one:

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2020/07/tiny-desktop-apps-tauri-vuejs/

Wondering if there would be any issues using this with quasar? Electron does have quiet a bit of code-bloat :P

Any thoughts on this? I want to try it out and will report back here. But thought I would already put this out here to start a discussion.

[customautosys]

I hope this will be considered too.

[yeus]

I just want to report back that I followed the instruction https://tauri.app/v1/guides/getting-started/setup/integrate in order to setup tauri for my existing quasar project and it works great (that quasar project was built using yarn create quasar)! really awesome in fact... Didn#t have any problems at all and tauri works out-of-the-box with the standard configuration with quasar.

There are some things that could be made more comfortable with quasar though:

• add quasar icon support for tauri
• integrate tauri API in quasar
• add a tauri flag
• right now I have to launch tauri dev and quasar dev in parallel... maybe that could be made more elegant as well..

more to come!

But my first impression is that tauri is a HUGE improvement over electron apps.. now trying to build a stand-alone app desktop app and will report the resulting size :P

EDIT: update links

[customautosys]

I'm currently waiting for AppX and Snap support.

Out of curiosity, do you happen to know if Tauri has crates to:
Convert HTML to PDF (yes I know about html2pdf and jspdf, but I have some issues with their PDF rendering - the built-in electron PDF print function works much better)
OCR PDFs (again I know about Tessaract JS - it is quite slow)

[customautosys]

Oh BTW I found this in case anyone is interested: https://github.com/harshkhandeparkar/tauri-snap-packager

[hermit99]

@yeus Was your existing quasar project using Electron and you migrated from electron to tauri?

[yeus]

@hermit99 no.. I started a fresh project ...

[kantum]

Tauri is very promising, however there are still things that don't work out of the box, for example webrtc

[hermit99]

Now that Tauri reaches 1.0 milestone, just wondering what is the strategy from Quasar team to integrate with Tauri? Is there any plan or roadmap? Thanks

[lu-zero]

tauri is also about to gain mobile support, so it will be also an alternative to cordova.

[yeus]

just want to say I am happily using tauri in combination with quasar for a lot of things now haven#t run into any issues since then!. :)

[lu-zero]

would you write a tutorial about it?

[maxiride]

Found a repo with Quasar + Tauri: https://github.com/ricardodarocha/vite-quasar-tauri-template

Didn't test its yet, it's not updated and might be unstable. Could be a starting point in case @yeus doesn't come back with some info on how he did it.

[fairking]

I work on some Wails + Quasar project. Also have no issues with that at all (so far).
Tauri? Rust is not my cup of tea. I feel it's too complicated in my opinion. I just don't want waste my time.

You can find Quasar template here: https://wails.io/docs/community/templates/#vue

[SymphonyCR]

Following this!, Tauri seems to be a game changer improvement over Electron, and if their mobile support works, it could be an all in one alternative to Capacitor/Cordova/Electron.

[Heartnett]

[yeus]

Not sure, but neutralino.js and tauri essentially follow the same concept, right? If you don't want to, you would never come into contact with any rust code in tauri (at least thats the case in my own project. Its pure js based I also run it as a PWA).

They both use a lightweight javascript engine. And both of them offer a javascript API to do "local" thinks that don't work in a browser like interacting with the local file system. So except for the differences in their javascript API they both fulfill the same job. my issue neutralino is mostly that it depends on the javascript engine on your system. So when installing it in different systems, you potentially get different javascript engines and could break your app. Tauri avoids that by appending a lightweight rust engine.

[yeus]

Here you are talking about your project. More often than not, there will be many instances where one will have to interact with > the file system, handle certain events, perform some heavy processing, interact with the OS, etc. For that you need to write rust.

No that's not correct . Tauri provides a javascript API for all of the things you mentioned, you wouldn't need to touch any Rust code for that at all (You will come in touch with the Rust package manager but nothing else from rust). here is the documentation --> https://tauri.app/v1/api/js/

I will not be considering tauri, unless a JS/TS API wrapper is developed for their rust engine.

well then I guess you can consider it now because that's exactly what they have already done a while ago ;-). Check the docs above.

I am not saying, that you should write Rust. And by using Tauri, with a very high likelyhood you will not come in touch with any rust code either.

I agree that neutralino.js is an awesome project as well. Tauri, Neutralino.js and Wails are all super similar, follow the same concept. The small differences how I see them are:

• for neutralino, the build process is probably faster than tauri
• tauri provides its own web engine which guarantees your app works on all clients.
• tauri api is based on rust which probably makes it more secure on most systems.
• neutralino apps might be slightly smaller, as they integrate the OS's libraries. But we're talking about really small difference her.e.. a few MBs at most.
• neutralino is probably a little easier to configure in the beginning than tauri as there is no initial build process.

[Edge-coordinates]

Hey, guys, any new developments in this matter? Will there be any official support?

[customautosys]

Just wondering, has anyone tried SciterJS before? How was your experience compared to Neutralino and Tauri?

[NaturalDevCR]

Just following up this, it would be great

[mr-zwets]

It's a great time to re-visit this discussion as Tauri has recently had it's v2 stable release!

A very much awaited part of this release is the mobile operating system support. The previous version of Tauri allowed to have a single UI code base for desktop operating systems but now this extends to iOS and Android.

As the website says 'Build your app for Linux, macOS, Windows, Android and iOS - all from a single codebase.'

'Minimal Size By using the OS’s native web renderer, the size of a Tauri app can be little as 600KB.'

https://v2.tauri.app/blog/tauri-20/

[mr-zwets]

I found it was incredibly easy to add src-tauri to an existing quasar project

I created a repo for it here to show the changes I did: https://github.com/mr-zwets/quasar-tauri

I simply copied the src-tauri from the tauri demo app into the folder of a demo quasar-project and then fixed the dependencies, scripts & configs 😄

[fairking]

I wish Wails supports Android. Cannot do rust, it's too harsh to me. 😄

[TobyMosque]

or even better, follow the docs and use the CLI:

pnpm create quasar
cd quasar_proj
pnpm add -D @tauri-apps/cli@latest
pnpm tauri init
pnpm tauri dev

[yeus]

I wish Wails supports Android. Cannot do rust, it's too harsh to me. 😄

@fairking

thats a misconception about tauri. You never have to come in contact with rust if you don't want to. We've had that discussion earlier in the thread but the post got deleted by the user (#12509 (comment)). You can still check out my response. Tauri gives you a javascript API just like a browser or electron. Essentially, tauri is a very lightweight browser written in rust. But that doesn't mean have to program in rust. give it a go its really not hard to use :)